Hacker News: alvatar

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

alvatar — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 11:18:26 +0000

what third party do you need? The program can be opensource. The verification can be done onchain

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

alvatar — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 16:46:21 +0000

zero knowledge cryptography solves this

New comment by alvatar in "Skip the Tips: A game to select "No Tip" but dark patterns try to stop you"

alvatar — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 08:33:02 +0000

Should be mandatory training to obtain the ESTA permit to enter USA (even if just for transfers)

New comment by alvatar in "Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale"

alvatar — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 12:08:37 +0000

Just writing here a line in defense of Rothko. His paintings are far harder to paint than it looks like. There were hundreds of layers, thinly applied, and carefully thought and with a developed technique. Try to paint that by yourself and you'll see.

New comment by alvatar in "Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale"

alvatar — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 12:07:21 +0000

Actually Rothko is way harder to paint than it looks.

New comment by alvatar in "Show HN: You.com, private search engine that summarizes the web – built for devs"

alvatar — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 22:23:19 +0000

Very cool! I'm gonna give it a chance for sometime as a default instead of DuckDuckGo

New comment by alvatar in "Instead of cheques to fight climate change, billionaires should just pay taxes"

alvatar — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 18:35:47 +0000

I trust the billionaires more than I trust governments. Which doesn't mean that I trust billionaires.

New comment by alvatar in "William Byrd on logic and relational programming, miniKanren (2014)"

alvatar — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 10:27:00 +0000

For a split second I thought a composer from the English Renaissance era wrote a book about logic.

New comment by alvatar in "PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus"

alvatar — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 15:04:57 +0000

I hope this fixes my issues with bluetooth on Linux. When I'm on battery the audio breaks all the time. I've tried all sorts of obscure config tweaks with Pulseaudio.

New comment by alvatar in "Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play Store"

alvatar — Sat, 30 Jan 2021 11:55:22 +0000

This just made me install Element right away and finally get away from Signal (and of course Whatssap) and bring as many people with me as possible

New comment by alvatar in "Villarejo: The rise and fall of the Spanish state’s secret fixer"

alvatar — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 13:00:12 +0000

So true. As a spaniard I do it all the time. Love/hate my country.

New comment by alvatar in "State of Emacs Lisp on Guile"

alvatar — Tue, 19 May 2020 12:46:52 +0000

I think it's easier to port everything elisp to Scheme (with some help by automation perhaps), than having an Emacs implementation in a Scheme that runs in all implementation of Scheme. I've worked many years in Scheme and the differences between compilers and interpreters are too large, especially when it comes to low-level functionality necessary for good performance.

New comment by alvatar in "A Lesson from the Spanish Flu: Don’t End Restrictions Too Soon"

alvatar — Mon, 11 May 2020 08:37:45 +0000

I mostly agree with your comment. My main counterpoint to this angle, which is strictly correct, is that many people lack the same kind of context that you described, and do interpret “Spanish flu” and “Wuhan/Chinese flu” as “caused by them”, and in some cases even missing the historical perspective. There might be something to be said about blame in one case and the other, but I don’t think is that relevant (although perhaps at some point there should be some debate on the responsibility of China -if any- in this pandemic)

New comment by alvatar in "A Lesson from the Spanish Flu: Don’t End Restrictions Too Soon"

alvatar — Mon, 11 May 2020 08:31:44 +0000

Correct, my comment was devoid of opinion or arguments, it was just that, a comment. I also don’t see how your last paragraph contributes any better to a healthy debate though.

Regarding the false equivalence though, I didn’t imply that, since I don’t think you need to go so deep into the interpretation of words. If any point was to be made in my comment is just the plain wording “Spanish/Chinese flu” associates the location and its people to the stigma. This, repeated over time, contributes to the social imaginary. Not every one knows the historical facts so well, and many people hearing the words “Spanish flu”, missing the context, will still make the negative associations. And let’s not forget that for a considerable part of the population in USA (not in Europe though), Spanish means “speaks Spanish”.

New comment by alvatar in "A Lesson from the Spanish Flu: Don’t End Restrictions Too Soon"

alvatar — Mon, 11 May 2020 08:24:46 +0000

I agree with the stigma associated to locations. I believe this stigma also affects past events, even if less so. So I think the argument for renaming the 1918 pandemic holds as strongly as not naming any new one based on the geographical location.

New comment by alvatar in "A Lesson from the Spanish Flu: Don’t End Restrictions Too Soon"

alvatar — Sun, 10 May 2020 08:25:19 +0000

I find it interesting that it’s ok to call it Spanish Flu (while it wasn’t even originated there), but is politically incorrect to call this one the Wuhan virus or the Chinese flu. Political correctness has always a political intention I guess.

New comment by alvatar in "Dating of bones from Indonesia confirm Homo erectus roamed planet for 1.8M years"

alvatar — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 10:55:12 +0000

You are right. Sometimes I wish I were better at English.

New comment by alvatar in "Dating of bones from Indonesia confirm Homo erectus roamed planet for 1.8M years"

alvatar — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 10:16:20 +0000

I almost die in Java too.

New comment by alvatar in "Closh – Bash-like shell based on Clojure"

alvatar — Wed, 01 Nov 2017 14:45:05 +0000

Very cool! I use Clojure on a daily basis for coding, this is a great addition to the arsenal :) Actually, my main argument against _not using it_ is that Bash has this awkward syntax that is hard to remember if you don't use it often... But anyway, I keep forgetting it after years so I might as well embrace it and take the leap to use this. Thanks for the initiative!

New comment by alvatar in "Catalan parliament declares independence from Spain"

alvatar — Mon, 30 Oct 2017 04:01:36 +0000

Here you have a hint of the indoctrination: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/29/world/europe/spain-catalo...

“We are not even allowed to wear a bracelet to school with the Spanish flag’s colors, but you can wear one with the independence colors,” Ms. Camina said.

Ollala de Mora, 16, said: “People in school are really against Spain. Our teachers try to influence us. They say the Spain steals from us and the government is bad. If you think differently from that, they try to change your mind.”

That is indoctrination, and there are constant examples of this in daily life for decades. Only the thought of hating Spain is encourage, and less often the thought of coexistence. No wonder that things are like they are now.

And NY Times is one the biased media I see, clearing the supporting more the Catalonian side.