Hacker News: EarlKing

New comment by EarlKing in "A Simpler Parametrization for Modern Optimizers"

EarlKing — Wed, 06 May 2026 13:11:38 +0000

Yeah, I'm just getting a 404 clicking through this.

New comment by EarlKing in "Your phone is about to stop being yours"

EarlKing — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:42:45 +0000

> Google should capture all your calls and check if there could be scamming going on, right?

If you're dumb enough to own a Pixel then arguably they're doing something just as bad.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/1097qm0/manual...

New comment by EarlKing in "YouTube now lets you turn off Shorts"

EarlKing — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 01:05:58 +0000

Right. Just like they let you turn off those stupid games that keep popping up no matter how many times you tell them you're not interested.

New comment by EarlKing in "The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House"

EarlKing — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 22:56:45 +0000

If people actually bothered to look at any of his code, and the reactions of people knowledgeable at the time to his code (and/or his intellectual bloviations), the damage to "open source" would be so thorough that we'd probably all be using Microsoft products for an indefinite period. However, it's far easier to just nod your head and pretend he's very smart (in that reddit sort of way).

Personally, I love reading about people's reactions to the abomination of fetchmail, although my absolute favorite is him yapping with pride that he has code in basically everything -- which is ESRspeak for him writing libgif. Of course, dig down into that and you'll find he didn't write anything... he ported an MSDOS library someone else had written. Many such cases.

New comment by EarlKing in "A Few Good Magazines From the 70s and 80s"

EarlKing — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 01:08:21 +0000

> Playboy Magazine in the 50s and 60s had a reputation for, among other things, reviewing hi-fi systems, pop albums and surprisingly good fiction. Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione must have wanted some of the tech + fiction market because he and his wife Kathy Keeton launched Omni Magazine in 1978.

Either that got ninja-edited in the 8 minutes since you posted that comment, or you misread that paragraph.

New comment by EarlKing in "Every Law a Commit – US Law in GitHub"

EarlKing — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 01:00:35 +0000

Because it drips with the kind of attitude that screams "script kiddie" in bold 120pt font? (I mean, it appears to be LLM-written, so...)

New comment by EarlKing in "The future of Amazon coders is the present of Amazon warehouse workers"

EarlKing — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:02:18 +0000

> As Doctorow says, this is why huge corps segregate people into casts - to keep them from seeing the other's contribution and to keep them hating the other instead of hating those who exploit both.

This is my point. I've grown tired of telling people to hate those who exploit us all when they're tossed crumbs from their master's table and decide that is sufficient to make common cause with him.

I'll shed a tear for the common coder when they can spare a tear for the rest of us.

New comment by EarlKing in "The future of Amazon coders is the present of Amazon warehouse workers"

EarlKing — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 02:32:03 +0000

I'm sure I'm supposed to sympathize with the plight of the poor Amazon coder, but since everyone in the valley are encouraged to systematically shit on everyone they believe is beneath them.... I can't.

...and don't tell me they don't. I've been to way too many corporate parties and seen how they act when they think no one is watching.

New comment by EarlKing in "Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age"

EarlKing — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:23:02 +0000

Yes, I know that. I'm saying this is utterly futile and if they really wanted to accomplish something they'd structure themselves as I described above. If their goal is to highlight the absurdity of the law... they won't actually accomplish anything. The Attorney General is not going to magically decide this was a terrible idea and reverse course. If they want to change the law then this isn't the way to do it either. If they want to ensure business as usual then what I propose is one way to do that.

New comment by EarlKing in "Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age"

EarlKing — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 23:44:56 +0000

The truly aggravating part is that if they really wanted to thumb their noses at the Attorney General's office and get away with it there's a pretty straightforward way to do it: Fork every single project they want to offer through their operating system and thereby become a first-party developer-distributor thereof. AB 1043 is worded in such a way that it really doesn't apply if the operating system developer doesn't provide a covered application store (see 1798.501(a)(1)). This should apply in every other such app store accountability act in every other state (save Texas, since this is the text they seemed to adopt after the Texas law was challenged). Instead, all they're going to accomplish is getting pimpslapped by the Attorney General's office.

Maybe they're interested in performative noncompliance, but I'm not. I'd rather engage in creative and effective noncompliance.

New comment by EarlKing in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

EarlKing — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 05:36:33 +0000

An intellectual Mode rather than a Mean or a Median?

New comment by EarlKing in "A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification"

EarlKing — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 03:54:16 +0000

There are already "App Store Accountability Act"s present in Texas and Utah. I believe South Dakota is the other state that has one in their House right now. So no, this isn't California being a nanny state. Actually, California's is a lot better than the ones found in other states since literally you're allowed self-attestation of your age bracket (i.e. you don't have to supply an ID or some other such mechanism for independent verification). It's literally the equivalent of what they used to do with porn sites back in the day when they would ask you if you were over 18 -- and if you said yes, well, we tried! (Gold stars for everybody!)

In all seriousness, though, this is the only way where politicians get to pretend they did something and the rest of us get to avoid getting royally screwed. If parents were given dumbed-down versions of the tools that already exist to manage corporate-owned cell phones and laptops then there'd be a lot less for people to complain about (not that it would stop perpetually incompetent parents from pointing the finger at everyone but themselves for their own failings, of course, but at least the vast majority who AREN'T those people would be satisfied).

New comment by EarlKing in "Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers"

EarlKing — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 22:07:37 +0000

It is not about whether or not it is available for free, at cost, or otherwise, but whether or not the activity has the character of commercial product development. It's what the product is used for, not what price it's set at. A 501(c)(3) directly developing, or funding the development, of commercial software is not engaged in charitable, educational, or other exempt activities.

For reference: This is exactly what happened to the Yorba Foundation, and numerous others since then.[1]

[1] https://www.stradley.com/business-vantage-point-blog/irs-con...

New comment by EarlKing in "Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers"

EarlKing — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 20:02:15 +0000

> Using the model of the university and various tenured profs, I'm not sure what you are saying is true. But, perhaps it's a misunderstanding of what I was intending.

Tenured professors are not engaged in commercial product development.

New comment by EarlKing in "Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers"

EarlKing — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 20:01:31 +0000

Boldly asserting that all grants will be made exclusively for charitable or educational purposes does nothing to change the character of the grant. If you're giving money to someone for commercial product development then you're giving money to someone for commercial product development ... and if that constitutes the majority of what you do then you've got a major problem.

New comment by EarlKing in "Twitch: "Hey, come back! This commercial break can't play while you're away.""

EarlKing — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:53:16 +0000

It's like someone saw an episode of Black Mirror and Idiocracy and went, "That's it! That's what we need to do!" and began using them as a playbook.

Yeah, I'm sure this won't drive massive adoption of ad blockers or anything.

New comment by EarlKing in "Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers"

EarlKing — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:44:19 +0000

So.... you just created a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization to offer grants for product development.

Yeah, this will end well.

New comment by EarlKing in "Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers"

EarlKing — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:42:35 +0000

Well, speaking in the case of the US, this would constitute product development which is well outside the scope of what a 501(c)(3) organization should be doing, which could thereby jeopardize their tax status? Or, in the case of a state-run university, this raises all kinds of issues regarding how tax money is being given away to random schmoes instead of benefitting the public at large.

So, yeah, there's plenty of reasons why they don't do that.

Open source wouldn't have a funding problem if people would stop being so averse to just paying for what they use. Maybe... the world should stop expecting something for nothing.

New comment by EarlKing in "Build Your Own Forth Interpreter"

EarlKing — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 03:07:54 +0000

> There is a common myth about newbie programmers that FORTH is write-only and that you need to type everything in one line, without comments or function calls etc.

By contrast, in APL it's not a myth at all.

New comment by EarlKing in "The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection"

EarlKing — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 15:55:13 +0000

More than a few companies. Nothing would allow advertisers to justify raising ad rates quite like being able to point out that their users are real rather than bots.