Hacker News: slwvx

New comment by slwvx in "Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance"

slwvx — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:43:09 +0000

zero-knowledge proofs are a well-known tool in cryptography [1]. All Google is sharing is the library to implement it. Google would not have access to the information any more than they have access to the bank info of people who use Android or Gmail.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof

New comment by slwvx in "San Francisco supervisors balk at 362-page, AI-assisted city code rewrite"

slwvx — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 02:17:00 +0000

mb go back and split this into multiple pull requests

New comment by slwvx in "Apple to skip high-end M6 Mac chips in favor of AI-focused M7 line"

slwvx — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 17:41:50 +0000

The URL above is wrong. At present it is https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articlehttps://www.bloomberg....

I guess it should be https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-25/apple-to-...

New comment by slwvx in "Kahneman: Theory Induced Blindness"

slwvx — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 01:49:25 +0000

Daniel Kahneman: "I can explain it only by a weakness of the scholarly mind that I have often observed in myself. I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. If you come upon an observation that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly good explanation that you are somehow missing. You give the theory the benefit of the doubt, trusting the community of experts who have accepted it."

mb related to choice supportive bias

New comment by slwvx in "Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone"

slwvx — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:24:36 +0000

  I don't think the out loud or someone listening / reacting matters at all here. Suspect it's entirely this:

  >The thought that was comfortable as a vague impression has to become a sentence, and sentences have structure.

I often construct full sentences in my head. And have conversations with my mental model of some other person. In full sentences

New comment by slwvx in "Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone"

slwvx — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:22:49 +0000

I wonder if there's a difference between people who have a strong inner voice and those with no inner voice (Anendophasia). I.e. do people w Anendophasia do better on their own than those with a strong inner voice?

New comment by slwvx in "Semiclassical Gravity Efficiently Solves NP-Complete Problems"

slwvx — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:53:11 +0000

Are you sure you're looking at the right paper? I don't find the sentence you mention in the paper.

New comment by slwvx in "Making espresso with ultrasound"

slwvx — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:27:01 +0000

I grow my own beans and harvest rain water from my roof to use in my coffee ritual and ... am happy to let others do their own thing

New comment by slwvx in "The history of butterfly swimming"

slwvx — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:33:29 +0000

> to that end, i'm not sure why it exists, except that it's truly a unique style.

Many people swim as a form of exercise. Fly is exercising different muscles and allows me to get my heart rate up higher than freestyle

Fly is useful to train for other strokes

Perhaps more importantly, I think that having a different stroke to do makes swimming more interesting. Whether doing sets as part of a swim team or on your own, it's more interesting when you can vary things. The more swimming is interesting, the easier it is to enjoy and keep doing it

New comment by slwvx in "Apple Made a Sports App That Does Almost Nothing. It's Incredible"

slwvx — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 20:13:12 +0000

give Apple some time; they'll add ads and otherwise enshitify the app

New comment by slwvx in "A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center"

slwvx — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:18:00 +0000

To be explicit, if one separates ownership rights and development rights, and gives the development easement to a conservation trust/foundation that has a mandate to never sell them, I guess things will go better. There are land conservation trusts all over the US and if there isn't one you can create one.

To be clear, I guess that a city who had ownership rights but not development rights could be stupid and ignore a conservation easement, but I guess that is not likely.

New comment by slwvx in "Show HN: Ironwall, a safety-first native programming language and compiler"

slwvx — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:45:45 +0000

Is there a story behind the hash-like Github username [1], email address [2], and HN usernames [3]?

[1] https://github.com/3WyUFvDOdCbBw7gOZHwcfgKF

[2] IZ1zPtHyDX5b3s7iLYS2zRoz5 @ proton.me

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bOZbfU4YdRnJQ

New comment by slwvx in "A Man Who Reads Books for a Living (One Every Two Days)"

slwvx — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:42:34 +0000

Sounds like a "dickover", a term coined by John Gruber: https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover

New comment by slwvx in "Pluto.jl 1.0 release – reactive notebook for Julia"

slwvx — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 03:11:26 +0000

I would love Pluto but am completely put off by the output of a command being shown above the command that creates it. Sure, maybe the whole notebook is reactive, and I shouldn't care, but I still see Pluto as producing something close to a document or web page, which I want to read from top to bottom, and can't do with Pluto. This single feature/problem has kept me away from Pluto

New comment by slwvx in "A Gentle Introduction to Lattice-Based Cryptography [pdf]"

slwvx — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 01:30:29 +0000

> Seems to me that these lattices and error-correcting codes are very close to each other...

mb see https://www.amazon.com/Lattice-Coding-Signals-Networks-Quant...

New comment by slwvx in "SICP Video Lectures (1986)"

slwvx — Sun, 31 May 2026 17:25:33 +0000

> ...the constraints imposed in building large software systems are the limitations of our own minds.

There are always constraints and limitations, including those to build and provide energy for software, and also the societal impacts. I guess the designer of Bitcoin and of current AI datacenters ignored constraints in the way described in the quote and the world is now paying the price in higher carbon emissions and energy prices

New comment by slwvx in "Snuffleupagus, a newly described species, is an adorable little predator"

slwvx — Mon, 25 May 2026 00:09:58 +0000

Quoting the article:

  Milton Love, a marine biologist at the University of California’s Marine Science Institute in Santa Barbara, Calif., says the fish's muppet-like appearance demonstrates "the awesome power of natural selection."  ...    "Or, and here is another hypothesis, Gaia created this fish after having one too many of those rum drinks that come with those little umbrellas."

Nice :-)

New comment by slwvx in "Why Trump Lost to Iran"

slwvx — Mon, 25 May 2026 00:03:08 +0000

https://archive.ph/GO28d

New comment by slwvx in "'Capitalism has to become more humane': a Stanford economist on big tech"

slwvx — Wed, 20 May 2026 22:21:08 +0000

> those who do have capital and earn their income from labor...

I meant "those who do NOT have capital ...

New comment by slwvx in "'Capitalism has to become more humane': a Stanford economist on big tech"

slwvx — Tue, 19 May 2026 23:37:17 +0000

"The Great Tax Wars" by Steven R. Weisman is about the debate about taxes during the progressive era. On p 123 [1] we read

  “Since 1860, federal taxation had increased sixfold, yet the tax burden was primarily borne by the poor. At the same time, corporate profits had increased tenfold, much of it untaxed. It cost rich Americans 8 to 10 percent of their earnings to finance the government, while the poor paid taxes equivalent to 75 to 80 percent of their savings.”

Sounds very much like today: those with capital (like me) are benefiting from a low tax rate, while those who do have capital and earn their income from labor pay a higher percentage of their income as taxes. I definitely see the debates of the progressive era as being about capital.

[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Great_Tax_Wars/kw-Q...