Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?
The article discusses complex technical challenges faced by the author in network configuration and programming. It highlights the use of ebtables for VPN functionality and the development of a cooperative multi-tasker for Turbo Pascal. The author reflects on the difficulties encountered and the eventual solutions implemented.
- ▪The author used ebtables and connection tracking to enhance VPN functionality in a dual homed network.
- ▪A significant challenge was writing a cooperative multi-tasker for Turbo Pascal programs under MS-DOS.
- ▪The author created a text piping engine to handle a unique requirement in an upload protocol.
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Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Ycombinator |
| Canonical URL | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48334224 |
| Publication time | Sat, 30 May 2026 09:09:13 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-30T09:42:09.036Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-30T09:42:09.036Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Sf1wpd_MrC4f |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
I used ebtables and packet labels/connection tracking to allow our in-house network VPN/Web servers to function seamlessly in our dual homed (but not BGP supported) internet connections, each with different public addresses and gateways. It's now stock functionality in VPN/Firewall appliances, we ended up with SonicWall, but at the time it nearly melted my brain.A second hardest was writing a cooperative multi-tasker for Turbo Pascal programs under MS-DOS.[1] It made a copy of the stack, and the first time it returned from spawn twice, I was really, really confused....
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ycombinator.