Hacker News: gertlex

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

gertlex — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 15:57:47 +0000

They may be looking at the societal level and saying: "I can attempt to teach my kids best practices, but I've learned I sure can't rely on my peers to do the same with their kids...", then feeling like the outcome of that, if left as-is, is societal decline... and then believing that something needs to be done beyond the individual level.

New comment by gertlex in "Micropayments as a reality check for news sites"

gertlex — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 22:07:36 +0000

Ahh, right, definite blind spot for me! (extra so since I'm hearing impaired)

New comment by gertlex in "Micropayments as a reality check for news sites"

gertlex — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 20:53:24 +0000

Do you think the category of people that "consume their news" via primarily reading headlines from aggregators (google/apple mobile built-in "news") is significant or no?

(this is a big part of my consumption, and is combined with scrolling HN/reddit headlines; often to paywalled sites, which leads me to mostly reading comment discussions on those two sites)

(edit: disclaimer after reading a few other comments: I use Android; so don't have personal experience with Apple News, which may in fact be significantly different/better product)

New comment by gertlex in "Why I'm Worried About Job Loss and Thoughts on Comparative Advantage"

gertlex — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 15:22:55 +0000

> You’re making a choice to prioritize profit (or foreign countries) over the country that you benefit from. This is an immoral and short sighted business decision, as you will eventually see a backlash from the host countries you’re effectively operating as a parasite in.

I have the vague sense we're far enough into e.g. offshoring that it's not purely about "profits" but about being competitive because all your competitors are doing the same thing.

But, then again, wealth inequality increase doesn't seem to be slowing (so profits /are/ being achieved), and I mostly think about businesses in robotics (and I don't spend that much time pondering it) where there's a lot of complexity in the stack, needing more "manpower", and being smart with money spent is maybe /more/ important. Robotics is a smallll sliver of software dev companies... (thus, "vague sense")

New comment by gertlex in "How not to answer the salary question"

gertlex — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 20:13:01 +0000

I assume the mention of benefits was mostly a polite way to decline giving a number... It might also be more applicable in other industries/roles where benefits are more varied.

New comment by gertlex in "How not to answer the salary question"

gertlex — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 20:07:01 +0000

In limited experience, I've been unclear if this strategy changes when dealing with companies that actually list the salary range (generally when required per some recent state laws).

New comment by gertlex in "Palantir vs. the "Republik": US analytics firm takes magazine to court"

gertlex — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 20:33:32 +0000

I recently learned there's a massive gap in collection of fines relating to data handling violations, due to a (not covered) mix of non-collection and going through legal processes. (over the past 6 years: 4+ billion in fines; 20 million collected) Seems like a problem, and further changes might come partly from it.

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2026/01/12/data-protecti...

New comment by gertlex in "Fixing retail with land value capture"

gertlex — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 23:27:50 +0000

> If we let property taxes just be whatever they "should" be without penalizing home-buying in the process you could at least know what you'd be paying rather than having to factor in a 3-5x increase.

I wouldn't be surprised to hear this varies by jurisdiction. In CA, which has large property tax jumps on sales thanks to Prop 13, it seems like you can know the annual property taxes in advance. The sale price is the taxable valuation* and you can find what the local tax rate is (or you can infer it pretty closely from another recently sold home's public municipal taxes paid).

So solves one problem, but is still problematic :)

*I assume this is the general case, anyways; maybe there's details I'm forgetting about separate tax rates on the land and the improvements; the split of the overall proper value between those two categories was mystifying when I bought...

New comment by gertlex in "U.S. jobs disappear at fastest January pace since great recession"

gertlex — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 19:41:49 +0000

Ok, but there were also 36+ months prior to covid in Trump's first presidency...

New comment by gertlex in "Coding agents have replaced every framework I used"

gertlex — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 15:30:43 +0000

I agree with a bunch of this (I'm almost exclusively doing python and bash; bash is the one I can never remember more than the basics of). I will give the caveat that I historically haven't made use of fancy IDEs with easy lookup of function names, so would semi-often be fixing "ugh I got the function name wrong" mistakes.

Similar to how you outlined multi-language vs specialist, I wonder if "full stack" vs "niche" work unspokenly underlies some of the camps of "I just trust the AI" vs "it's not saving me any time".

New comment by gertlex in "Claude Opus 4.6"

gertlex — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 18:46:29 +0000

Can you provide more context to your statement? Are you talking about models in general? Or specific recent models? I'm assuming "one-shot approach" is how you classify the parent comment's question (and subsequent refined versions of it).

New comment by gertlex in "Captive Wi-Fi"

gertlex — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 05:32:13 +0000

I think it was 5+ years after first having an ipod touch (i.e. connecting to wifi while out and about) before I encountered the term, and never heard it widely used outside of text on the internet. Doesn't feel like it was commonly used, a la, "Complete your connection to our wifi via the Captive Portal after doing XYZ!"

New comment by gertlex in "Nvidia Stock Crash Prediction"

gertlex — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 20:34:09 +0000

This was also on top of claims (Jan 2025) that Deepseek showed that "we don't actually need as much GPU, thus NVidia is less needed"; at least it was my impression this was one of the (now silly-seeming) reasons NVDA dropped then.

New comment by gertlex in "Imagine 130M Washing Machines"

gertlex — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 19:14:14 +0000

That seems very lucky of the second city. Let's hope we get lucky with some generous billionaires soon!

I don't claim that regulations are simple, and incentives couldn't be created to result in infrastructure investment by the wealthy... but I won't hold my breath.

New comment by gertlex in "Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams"

gertlex — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 18:38:28 +0000

I'd default to assuming it's the respective roadmaps for Waymo and Tesla differed on which things to implement when, not training data, that results in the two behaving different.

New comment by gertlex in "I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me"

gertlex — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 23:04:26 +0000

I wonder if you've heard the expression "hitting your stride".

(native english speaker who was a bookworm as a kid; I admittedly had to ask gemini to recall the general phrase that I had in mind)

New comment by gertlex in "Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban"

gertlex — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 21:23:11 +0000

Am I wrong in feeling like the solution you outline is only applicable to an individual's kids? But at the societal level, it clearly seems we can't depend on enough parents to do what you talk about. Something else is needed.

I don't have answers to give. Certainly not a fan of the government approach of "everyone must prove their age online now", which I believe is how the AU law is done. (casual listening to Security Now podcast about this for a long while now)

New comment by gertlex in "Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines?"

gertlex — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 23:05:47 +0000

I haven't had a reason to use Google Translate in years, so will ask: Have they opted to not use/roll out modern LLM translation capabilities in the Google Translate product?

New comment by gertlex in "Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products"

gertlex — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 18:17:39 +0000

Nah, they probably just have Copilot as a bullet point on a slide, count that as "using AI", and are psyched for their next board meeting.

New comment by gertlex in "DRAM prices are spiking, but I don't trust the industry's why"

gertlex — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 00:03:30 +0000

apparently wspm is Wafer Starts Per Month

guess I'm interpretting "1million wspm; add 10%; was effectively a 20-30% capacity increase" in 2015.

Not sure where 5% then comes from. Guessing "relative shrink" is referring to process size (5, 4, 2 nm, whatever) not linearly corresponding to density of transistors, etc.