Hacker News: mbrubeck

New comment by mbrubeck in "A forecast of the fair market value of SpaceX's businesses"

mbrubeck — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 01:30:24 +0000

But why should the fairest price be equal to exactly 12 months of earnings? Why not 1 month, or 100 months?

Is there something special about the length of Earth's orbit that makes it the correct ratio for converting flows to values? If a business were incorporated on Mars, would the fair price be one Earth year of earnings, or one Mars year of earnings? (The latter price would be 88% higher.)

New comment by mbrubeck in "An Introduction to Writing Systems and Unicode"

mbrubeck — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 01:18:14 +0000

Thanks, I missed that 将 was shinjitai. I wonder what caused the weird mixture of glyphs in that example image.

New comment by mbrubeck in "An Introduction to Writing Systems and Unicode"

mbrubeck — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 19:08:09 +0000

Can you clarify which characters you're talking about? I don't see any examples of Japanese-specific kanji in the simplified Chinese examples.

For example, the first image uses 沟 and 时 forms that are found only in simplified Chinese. In both Japanese and traditional Chinese, these are written 溝 and 時.

The images also correctly use the Chinese forms of 統/统. The Japanese form [0] differs from both and does not appear in these images.

请 as shown in the image is similarly used only in simplified Chinese, not Japanese. In Japanese, the traditional Chinese form is normally used in handwriting, and an alternate form of the 訁 radical (different from either of the Chinese forms) is often used in printed text.

[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%B5%B1#Japanese

New comment by mbrubeck in "Ode to the AA Battery"

mbrubeck — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 19:53:23 +0000

The comment above is about non-rechargable lithium-metal batteries. You are thinking of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries.

New comment by mbrubeck in "Rust's Block Pattern"

mbrubeck — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:41:48 +0000

There's some active work recently on fixing blocking issues, e.g.:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/148725

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/149489

New comment by mbrubeck in "'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs"

mbrubeck — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 05:25:24 +0000

So first you say it has always cost this much, but in the next breath you say that its cost has outpaced a high rate of inflation. Mathematically, these can't both be true.

Seattle passes 70% college grads for first time

mbrubeck — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 21:55:11 +0000

Article URL: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-passes-70-college-grads-for-first-time/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46083125

Points: 5

# Comments: 3

New comment by mbrubeck in "NaN, the not-a-number number that isn't NaN"

mbrubeck — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 16:52:48 +0000

We're commenting on an article about IEEE 754 floating point values. Following the IEEE 754 standard, we have:

    >> isNaN(Infinity)
    false
    >> Infinity == Infinity
    true
    >> Infinity / Infinity == 1
    false

    >> isNaN(0)
    false
    >> 0 == 0
    true
    >> 0 / 0 == 1
    false

Also, you say NaN ("not a number") is "defined as a number" but Infinity is not. I would think every IEEE 754 value is either "a number" or "not a number". But apparently you believe NaN is both and Infinity is neither?

And you say 0 / 0 is "undefined" but the standard requires it to be NaN, which you say is "defined".

New comment by mbrubeck in "NaN, the not-a-number number that isn't NaN"

mbrubeck — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 16:00:34 +0000

> two equal numbers divided by themselves equal 1

That's not true. For example: 0 == 0, but 0/0 != 1.

(See also +Infinity, -Infinity, and -0.)

New comment by mbrubeck in "Websites are tracking you via browser fingerprinting"

mbrubeck — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 02:50:24 +0000

From over a decade ago, a paper on then-commercially-available browser fingerprinting tech, including a study of its deployment in the wild:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/SP.2013.43 Nick Nikiforakis, Alexandros Kapravelos, Wouter Joosen, Christopher Kruegel, Frank Piessens, and Giovanni Vigna. 2013. Cookieless Monster: Exploring the Ecosystem of Web-Based Device Fingerprinting. In Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP ’13).

New comment by mbrubeck in "Rust compiler performance"

mbrubeck — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 16:34:19 +0000

Oops, thanks for the correction.

New comment by mbrubeck in "Rust compiler performance"

mbrubeck — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 16:31:57 +0000

In versions earlier than 1.88, garbage collection required the unstable -Zgc flag (and a nightly toolchain). But in 1.88 and later, automatic garbage collection is enabled by default.

New comment by mbrubeck in "Rust compiler performance"

mbrubeck — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 16:24:39 +0000

Automatic garbage collection of old build artifacts* is coming in Rust 1.88 (currently on the beta channel, will become the new stable release in two weeks):

https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/12633

*EDIT: For now this only deletes old cached downloads, not build artifacts. Thanks epage for the correction below.

New comment by mbrubeck in "U.S. sanctions cloud provider 'Funnull' as top source of 'pig butchering' scams"

mbrubeck — Fri, 30 May 2025 16:41:54 +0000

In both of those cases the designated entity was incorporated in the US (KindHearts in Ohio, AHIF-Oregon in Oregon).

New comment by mbrubeck in "Icônes"

mbrubeck — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 18:04:07 +0000

In words like icône in French, ô is typically used where the original Greek uses ω (omega).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumflex_in_French#Indicatio...

New comment by mbrubeck in "Frink"

mbrubeck — Sat, 22 Mar 2025 00:15:16 +0000

units.txt defines `water` like this:

    water := gram / cm^3     // Standard density of water (defined)

1 g/cm^3 is the maximum density of water at standard pressure (1 atm), which it reaches at 3.98°C.

(Or at least, that used to be true by definition. Using the current definition of the kilogram, and the latest measurements of water density, the maximum density is actually closer to 0.99997 g/cm^3.)

New comment by mbrubeck in "Retro Boy: simple Game Boy emulator written in Rust, can be played on the web"

mbrubeck — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 18:08:19 +0000

Looks like the author has fixed that; it’s now available under the Apache License 2.0.

New comment by mbrubeck in "Show HN: Krep a High-Performance String Search Utility Written in C"

mbrubeck — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 16:40:02 +0000

Since krep doesn’t support regular expressions, it can’t run most of the ripgrep benchmark suite.

New comment by mbrubeck in "Apple unveils new Mac Studio"

mbrubeck — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 19:46:17 +0000

M2 Mac Studios were released in June 2023. https://support.apple.com/en-us/111835

New comment by mbrubeck in "Infosec 101 for Activists"

mbrubeck — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 01:42:42 +0000

Yes, they use Bing’s search index, but the relevant difference is that they promise not to retain logs of your searches associated with your IP address or other identifying data: https://duckduckgo.com/privacy