Hacker News: hackinthebochs

New comment by hackinthebochs in "Delta"

hackinthebochs — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 02:14:38 +0000

Pair programming is the extroverts answer to the solitariness of software development. They love it while everyone else is hating their existence. It works for short stints to solve specific problems but anything beyond that is just gratuitous.

New comment by hackinthebochs in "Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification"

hackinthebochs — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:21:01 +0000

I really don't know where you're coming from. You seem to be imagining that the law requires some kind of cryptographically validated age attestation. The law requires nothing of the sort. It's just an age field associated with the account. There are many ways to get around it, none of which the law demands protection against. It's simply a standardized way for parents to ensure a modicum of reasonably effective age-discrimination for online services.

There are no secure enclaves, no verification, and certainly no black markets. I really don't know where you are getting any of this from.

>TX passed a law stating that adult sites like pornhub must verify age.

Yes, when states are left to their own devices to come up with laws, some of them will be more onerous than others. But I don't know what you think you can infer from this. Casual dismissal was warranted.

New comment by hackinthebochs in "Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification"

hackinthebochs — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 22:43:46 +0000

>Also children can "come upon" devices

Yes, this mechanism isn't perfect, but is a substantial improvement over the status quo.

>and now that's stuck with the verified age set.

This inference is nonsensical.

>If "just let someone report the age" worked, pornhub wouldn't be blocked in TX.

Also nonsense

New comment by hackinthebochs in "Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification"

hackinthebochs — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:32:02 +0000

>but why can't the websites just ask me for my self declared age?

Because children just click through the age gate when it suits them. With this legislation, a parent that purchases the device and creates an account for the child can set the age once and take the decision out of the kids hands. It's a huge improvement without any significant privacy issues. I can't fathom why the tech crowd is having a collective aneurism over this.

>OS isn't the thing displaying content

But the account on the OS is the right place for the single source of truth of properties of the current user.

New comment by hackinthebochs in "Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification"

hackinthebochs — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:29:32 +0000

Why are you people in such a hurry to have facebook et al collecting government IDs?

New comment by hackinthebochs in "Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification"

hackinthebochs — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:24:25 +0000

Parents already have the ability to do this, at least when it comes to porn. The fact is that most parents aren't doing it. Hence the push for legislation that increase the uptake of content blocks for minors.

New comment by hackinthebochs in "Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age"

hackinthebochs — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 09:26:51 +0000

There's something to be said for realizing which way the winds are blowing and getting ahead of it. The fight against any and all age gating on the internet is already lost. The question is what will the system look like once it comes into being. This is something we have a lot of say over if we just stop being obstinate and start offering solutions. Sticking one's head in the sand will just result in a worse state of affairs in the end.

New comment by hackinthebochs in "Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age"

hackinthebochs — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 08:08:33 +0000

The breathless fearmongering over an age field on account set up is just completely over-the-top. This is probably the least bad out of all possible ways to implement age checking. The benefit of this is that it can short-circuit support for more onerous age verification. The writing has been on the wall for some time now: the era of completely unrestricted internet is coming to an end. The question is how awful will the new normal be? Legislation like this is a win all around, a complete nothingburger. We should be celebrating it, not fighting it tooth and nail.

New comment by hackinthebochs in "Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age"

hackinthebochs — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 08:04:11 +0000

What does "hold these companies responsible" look like to you? I see a lot of empty rhetoric without things being spelled out. If you just want these companies to not exist, just say that.

New comment by hackinthebochs in "Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age"

hackinthebochs — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 08:02:22 +0000

Why exactly are some of you guys advocating for platforms to have increased responsibility for verifying the age of their users? Why exactly do you want platforms to collect government IDs or contract with third party ID brokers? How is that an improvement over the user agent attesting to the age of the user?

New comment by hackinthebochs in "Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science"

hackinthebochs — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 23:05:41 +0000

Yeah, we really should just storm the facility where Musk is hoarding all the worlds bread and meat.

Wealth in terms of capital doesn't represent material goods, it represents the system's confidence in your ability to direct capital efficiently. But eventually efficient capital bottoms out at consumable goods. Someone like Musk with a lot of capital under his control is contributing to the end goal of unlimited abundance.

New comment by hackinthebochs in "Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects"

hackinthebochs — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 02:29:21 +0000

While that's true, it's unrelated to hosting code. A reliable code hosting site should be agnostic to content. Once they start making editorial decisions about what projects to host, why should anyone trust them with their project?

New comment by hackinthebochs in "Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects"

hackinthebochs — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 02:13:30 +0000

I'm also banned from the site for some reason despite never having been there before. Though I suspect my IP is on someone's naughty list for some reason seeing as I get far more captchas on the internet than I feel I should be getting.

New comment by hackinthebochs in "A digestion of the Jacobian conjecture counterexample"

hackinthebochs — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 22:31:04 +0000

A news aggregator is a community above all. Upvoting content that you may not personally be interested in but will attract the right people is a net benefit for the community[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44575026

New comment by hackinthebochs in "Why is it so hard for the U.S. to win wars?"

hackinthebochs — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 07:46:12 +0000

Thanks, seems comprehensive

New comment by hackinthebochs in "Why is it so hard for the U.S. to win wars?"

hackinthebochs — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 02:07:58 +0000

Do you have a source for this? The closest thing I've heard of was vague reports of children being shipped to Russia. I'm not denying it has ever happened, but the question is what is the motivation, how systematic is it, etc.

New comment by hackinthebochs in "Why is it so hard for the U.S. to win wars?"

hackinthebochs — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:19:44 +0000

It's interesting how casually we replace concern for the population with concern for the political entity. No, the Ukrainian identity will not cease to exist with the replacement of the political entity.

New comment by hackinthebochs in "Grok Build is open source"

hackinthebochs — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:43:03 +0000

The overly generous image/video generation was a product of their excess compute. No point in letting it sit idle while you build up your infrastructure. But you were getting far more than what you paid for. Now your quota more accurately reflects the cost to create it (even still its generous compared to api costs) but everyone has their expectations set based on the subsidized access. Perhaps giving away too much is counter productive because users will revolt once the quotas are changed to better reflect reality.

New comment by hackinthebochs in "Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely"

hackinthebochs — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:18:03 +0000

As long as the proles have a monopoly on force (through their representative government), the AI companies will pay taxes. The question is how long does this state of affairs last.

New comment by hackinthebochs in "Mechanistic interpretability researchers applying causality theory to LLMs"

hackinthebochs — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:21:09 +0000

SAT solvers are programs designed such that their execution corresponds to the reasoning process of satisfying some given constraints. But they do not contain the reasoning process, rather they embody it.

LLMs are different in that they operate on semantic features of program state. Embedding vectors assign semantic features to syntactical structures of the vector space. Operations on these syntactical structures allow the LLM to engage with semantic features of program state directly. Here the reasoning process is contained within as an object of manipulation. An LLM sensitive to the semantic features of the input sequence and that examines the logically permissible moves to derive a new sequence closer to the intended sequence (some statement to prove) just is engaging in reasoning.