Hacker News: Tarq0n

New comment by Tarq0n in "Switzerland proposes banning profiling-based ads to minors"

Tarq0n — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:53:35 +0000

Our aspirations for our children reflect our own anxieties. It's the same with social media bans.

Our culture is pretty permissive of businesses inflicting indirect harms on adults. I think a lot of that goes back to lobbying from the cigarette and alcohol industries.

New comment by Tarq0n in "Vi Hart's Big Navier-Stokes Post"

Tarq0n — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 10:44:23 +0000

This is a very basic misunderstanding of machine learning. The goal is always to learn a representation that generalizes beyond the training set without overfitting. If you succeed in generalizing, you can do more than produce derivative work.

New comment by Tarq0n in "`123456' password used in Danish CPR data breach"

Tarq0n — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 21:12:18 +0000

In a country like Denmark it's very common for a higher up to resign over something like this.

New comment by Tarq0n in "REA Reverse – Engineer Anything"

Tarq0n — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 08:26:01 +0000

That's not (just) gatekeeping. People try to internalize a positive self image, from positive internal and external validation. Skills can also be a source of status or meaning (usefulness to others).

Taking that away compounds with the crisis of meaning we already have to make people feel more alienated than ever.

New comment by Tarq0n in "500k facial scans at UK stations yield no arrests, 1 false positive"

Tarq0n — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 13:30:26 +0000

> "The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms."

> "God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary."

> "The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment."

> "The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization."

> "The human being created civilization not because of a willingness but because of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning."

> "God was a dream of good government."

> "You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands."

- Morpheus ( Deus Ex, 2000)

New comment by Tarq0n in "Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah"

Tarq0n — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 06:38:37 +0000

No. Look into the history of human rights. It's long been recognized that there need to be backstops against excesses of (democratic) government.

New comment by Tarq0n in "There is more to code review than (automatable) detection"

Tarq0n — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 08:28:49 +0000

I'm guessing you work on some highly technical domain that receives highly structured data and is amenable to TDD.

Not all domains are like that. The majority of bugs I see are business/domain logic bugs. It's akin to having misunderstood or missed some aspect of the question, not causing data loss.

New comment by Tarq0n in "I don't want the details"

Tarq0n — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 13:44:46 +0000

He wants to direct/align on strategy, not tactics. I'd say that's a good division of responsibility so I'm not sure I see your objection.

New comment by Tarq0n in "Charts built for Chat"

Tarq0n — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 09:36:39 +0000

Why go for a configuration based format over a library though? Something like Streamlit or Dash offers more control and lends itself better to interactive exploration.

New comment by Tarq0n in "FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses"

Tarq0n — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 07:46:47 +0000

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gold_standard

New comment by Tarq0n in "More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding"

Tarq0n — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 08:53:18 +0000

Being aware of Simpsons' paradox doesn't even help. There's no way of knowing what the right level of aggregation is without a theory.

New comment by Tarq0n in "Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services"

Tarq0n — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 16:12:17 +0000

In regulated industries and government they aren't going to be allowed to process your appeal with just AI, so there's a cost asymmetry there that favors the "ddos"ers.

New comment by Tarq0n in "Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services"

Tarq0n — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 16:10:26 +0000

It's not really about the dollar amount of fraud, but maintaining public support for benefits schemes. If people feel that benefits aren't going strictly to the intended recipients the sense of fairness that underlies the system is eroded.

There's also the issue that if you don't counter fraud it will accelerate as organized crime jumps on the bandwagon.

New comment by Tarq0n in "Google buys crashed airline Spirit's data at auction, because AI"

Tarq0n — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 12:47:49 +0000

There are deïdentification firms that service primarily the medical industry. Over here they call them trusted third parties.

New comment by Tarq0n in "Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots"

Tarq0n — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 10:49:51 +0000

You're not wrong that there's an element of self-defense. What makes it harder to accept is the lack of effort or willingness to de-escalate the conflict.

New comment by Tarq0n in "As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing"

Tarq0n — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:32:59 +0000

Where is the information going to come from though? LLMs aren't primary sources, they consume and regurgitate.

New comment by Tarq0n in "The tragedy of the commons, AI edition"

Tarq0n — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 08:53:00 +0000

There's still inequality in someone else receiving a false positive approval from the AI while another gets rejected. Equal treatment and stochastic systems don't mix.

New comment by Tarq0n in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

Tarq0n — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 20:36:14 +0000

That's a fine philosophy on a personal level, but if the labor market is shocked for entire sectors there's not enough slack in the system for all of those people to adapt at once. That's how you end up with lost generations.

New comment by Tarq0n in "The End of an Era"

Tarq0n — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 13:55:34 +0000

Sometimes the medium is the message though. Especially in literature, prose matters. It's not just about what is said but also how.

This applies even in "low" art. AI generated imagery from mainstream models tends to be so ugly it detracts from effectively communicating what the prompter intended.

New comment by Tarq0n in "IMAX vs. IMAX 70mm: The difference between these two cinema formats"

Tarq0n — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 13:41:51 +0000

I don't think the extra production cost, for the Odyssey at least, is likely to be offset by extra box office income. If you read about it, the massive cameras and limited running time of one load of film (less than five minutes) sounds very burdensome. That's not to mention the obscene cost of the film stock, as well as developing dailies and having to edit from film (they actually cut and pasted film together for the Final Cut of the IMAX version).

The trailers also looked much worse than the film which I suspect is related to difficulties with this whole process.