Hacker News: specialp

New comment by specialp in "Our Agreement with the Department of War"

specialp — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 22:06:07 +0000

Well it depends. Being that the federal government constitutes 20% of the US economy, telling federal agencies you cannot contract with someone because they are adversarial to the USA is indeed pretty severe. When in reality they are not adversarial. We have no choice but to pay taxes and make the federal government 20 percent of our economy. There is no single company or any other entity that is close. And extending it to everyone who has a government contract probably makes it the majority of the economy. So it is not at all equivalent to a private company making a choice

New comment by specialp in "MCP server that reduces Claude Code context consumption by 98%"

specialp — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 19:06:32 +0000

Do you need 80+ tools in context? Even if reduced, why not use sub agents for areas of focus? Context is gold and the more you put into it unrelated to the problem at hand the worse your outcome is. Even if you don't hit the limit of the window. Would be like compressing data to read into a string limit rather than just chunking the data

New comment by specialp in "Roger Ebert Reviews "The Shawshank Redemption" (1999)"

specialp — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 17:13:04 +0000

The "OK, let's not start sucking... yet " is the one that comes to mind during production fires but can't use that one at work unfortunately

New comment by specialp in "2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop"

specialp — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:46:12 +0000

Consumer Windows for those that care is an almost worthless business. Nobody will pay what was once paid for a windows license anymore. They will squeeze existing users who know no different in ways 2006 adware purveyors could dream of and monetize it that way. For the rest of non enterprise users, they don't care.

New comment by specialp in "BYD Sells 4.6M Vehicles in 2025, Meets Revised Sales Goal"

specialp — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 18:11:20 +0000

China has a huge deflation problem that they export to the world via cheap products. They have a lot of capacity and not enough consumers. So in China, an unstated mild Keynesian approach makes sense. They can sweep debt under the rug and take in inflation from net debtor countries

New comment by specialp in "Tesla’s 4680 battery supply chain collapses as partner writes down deal by 99%"

specialp — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 04:37:19 +0000

Somehow his company is worth ~1.6 trillion dollars, with most of that valuation being confidence in his predictions. He is predicting humanoid useful robots soon. Tesla's valuation defies reason

New comment by specialp in "Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications will be made open access"

specialp — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 19:58:10 +0000

It is almost unanimously agreed upon that impact factor is a flawed way of assessing scientific output, and there are a lot of ideas on how this could be done better. None of them have taken hold. Publishers are mostly a reputation cartel.

Clarivate does control it because they tend to have the best citation data, but the formula is simple and could be computed by using data freely accessible in Crossref. Crossref tends to under report forward citations though due to publishers not uniformly depositing data.

New comment by specialp in "Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications will be made open access"

specialp — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 19:52:07 +0000

It is on acceptance almost universally. This is why more selective journals have higher APCs. The overhead of reviewing and processing more papers when less ultimately convert costs money.

New comment by specialp in "GraphQL: The enterprise honeymoon is over"

specialp — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 22:59:03 +0000

Contracts for data with OpenAPI or an RPC don't come with the overhead of making a resolver for infinite permutations while your apps probably need a few or perhaps one. Which is why REST and something for validation is enough for most and doesn't cost as much.

New comment by specialp in "Nokia N900 Necromancy"

specialp — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 02:38:14 +0000

I remember when the N900 came out other phones including the iPhone could not process a web page with AJAX or most javascript and Flash. It truly gave you a desktop experience on a phone. You could open a terminal and ssh into a server or do whatever you want. Another funny thing people forget: It had another Finnish company's game for it that later became wildly successful: Rovio Angry Birds

New comment by specialp in "Blocking LLM crawlers without JavaScript"

specialp — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 02:41:32 +0000

Agentic crawlers are worse. I run a primary source site and the ai "thinking" user agents will hit your site 1000+ times in a minute at any time of the day

New comment by specialp in "Guideline has been acquired by Gusto"

specialp — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 01:58:30 +0000

The real mover for lower retirement plan fees was lawsuits. There have been loads of 401k excessive fee class action lawsuits and this got almost every employer negotiating to avoid this. Of course there's some plausible deniability in some cases but there is something on the other side against that https://hallbenefitslaw.com/401k-excessive-fee-class-action-...

New comment by specialp in "A worker fell into a nuclear reactor pool"

specialp — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 01:47:06 +0000

Not at all. My scintillating counter will do 300 cpm as background. The most concerning thing here will be the ingestion of the water. Even low level emitters can be very bad when the are inside the body

New comment by specialp in "Chen-Ning Yang, Nobel laureate, dies at 103"

specialp — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 00:25:19 +0000

Rentec is still world renowned after pioneering the quant business 40+ years ago. I don't think the rested on their laurels with some easy thing that they just stumbled on early

New comment by specialp in "PlayStation 3 Architecture (2021)"

specialp — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 02:16:18 +0000

It was the biggest contributor to folding @ home at one point. It came bundled with the PS3 and played relaxing music and showed a heat map of the world ps3 compute nodes as it went on. There was also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

New comment by specialp in "How did sports betting become legal in the US?"

specialp — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 01:28:05 +0000

And if you are consistently winning they will ban you! They can legally back off (reduce max bet to a tiny amount) or straight up ban people who bet smart.

These books also market what are the hardest to understand and worst bets to consumers. Think 4 way parlays. Like all 4 legs seem reasonable. They probably on their own each have a 70 pct probability. But that means a 24 pct of hitting. Of course they are all over props because people love to bet over. They are taking advantage of the fact that most people don't understand expected value or odds of multiple independent things happening

New comment by specialp in "Next.js is infuriating"

specialp — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 16:28:56 +0000

Because making it easy to run and monitor NextJS is never in their interest. The difficulty of that is what pushes people that make it to production with Next onto their platform. The goal is to provide more impressive preoptimizations that complicate the stack more and make it more difficult to run NextJS yourself and actually use any of them.

New comment by specialp in "Next.js is infuriating"

specialp — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 16:23:01 +0000

People get funneled to their paid plans out of necessity. While NextJS is open source, the back-end to run it is not. That is where all the complexity lies. Even on Netlify, you run into crazy issues with things like their image stack. It does all this "Optimization" and caching that make it completely impossible to reason about and you run into implementation problems from the providers. Sure you can just run it in a container but then you are taking on all the complexity of NextJS preoptimizations without getting any of them.

Serverless framework attempted to make this stack to run yourself for Next but it is buggy due to the complexity of Next. Open source includes being able to run it. Releasing the framework and funding OSS that also enhances NextJS is nice, but it is a trap because if it comes time to seriously run it, your only option is vercel.

New comment by specialp in "Web Bot Auth"

specialp — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 02:20:56 +0000

I will tell you that we have had bot super fight mode on for a year and since then we have not had to address abusing traffic nor deal with legitimate people blocked. There is no way we could have achieved such balance. prior to that it was me blocking every Chinese AS under the sun as they shifted and bombarded us with traffic

New comment by specialp in "Web Bot Auth"

specialp — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 02:16:36 +0000

I run a site that is a primary source of information. We also have customers that subscribe and are very sensitive to heavy handed controls. Before cloudflare and after "AI" we had bots from all over just destroying our endpoints with bursts of mining traffic. While we would love to have more discoverability this is not that. Cloudflare is in a tough spot trying to arbitrate good traffic vs bad. From my experience they are doing this as good as one can.