Hacker News: space_fountain

New comment by space_fountain in "Got kicked out of uni and had the cops called for a social media website I made"

space_fountain — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 22:16:42 +0000

I don't think this person belongs in prison, but the internet also isn't the place it was in 2004? You do bear responsibility for what you do online, and this was irresponsible. We should encourage kids and others to experiment and make mistakes, but the kid shouldn't have put up this website and should have taken it down as a responsible member of the community

New comment by space_fountain in "The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode"

space_fountain — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:59:13 +0000

I've tried to use langchain. It seemed to force code into their way of doing things and was deeply opinionated about things that didn't matter like prompt templating. Maybe it's improved since then, but I've sort of used people who think langchain is good as a proxy for people who haven't used much ai?

New comment by space_fountain in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

space_fountain — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:38:21 +0000

My view is that testosterone is a reasonable thing to discriminate on because:

1. It is causally connected to primary and secondary sex characteristics

2. It has a large impact on performance in many sports

3. It's easy to explain to most people and somewhat matches people's intuitions around fairness

But, yes, it is true that there are cis women with high T levels and it is somewhat unfair and arbitrary to include them when not excluding other random advantages that people have. I'm just not sure if I have a better solution

New comment by space_fountain in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

space_fountain — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 03:54:55 +0000

I said "Sports should only be segregated by this category, except that to remove perverse incentives it’s reasonable to require hrt"

That was trying to elaborate on citruscomputing's argument where they said "Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care."

I'm rephrasing those two points. Apologies if I initially described that badly, but I'm just restating the perverse incentive they were talking about

New comment by space_fountain in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

space_fountain — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 03:03:38 +0000

Nope, I’m consistently saying the same thing. When have I said something else?

New comment by space_fountain in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

space_fountain — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 02:56:52 +0000

Again I don’t take it be saying that. It’s saying that encouraging women to be forced to be in emotional distress to succeed at sport is problematic so we should require hrt so that elite sport doesn’t require trans women to skip hrt

New comment by space_fountain in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

space_fountain — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 02:53:41 +0000

No, but that’s not what the statement is saying. It’s arguing that we should add the minimum restrictions we can to the women’s sports category and that hormones might be a reasonable one

New comment by space_fountain in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

space_fountain — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 02:52:35 +0000

I’m not defending this definition, but I will point out that gender has never been about the chromosomes you were born with. It has been about how people around you perceived you and people often have overly simplistic ideas about exactly what that meant.

Plus it’s totally normal for words to have more technical detail than they first appeared. The idea of a sex binary doesn’t fully exist so we’d need something to deal with that anyway.

I personally support segregation based on hormones as the fairest option available. Otherwise if you use purely a genetic test there are plenty of women with high t levels without an sry gene and no one disputes that high t levels confer a biological advantage in many sports

New comment by space_fountain in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

space_fountain — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 02:17:06 +0000

I think not many people are arguing that we shouldn’t exclude people based on testosterone in elite events, but none of these were trans women, these were all women who lived their entire lives as women from the moment they were born

New comment by space_fountain in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

space_fountain — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 02:14:20 +0000

It’s interesting how the evidence based analysis switched as soon as the republicans came into power. Maybe this is less about evidence and more about opinion actually?

New comment by space_fountain in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

space_fountain — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 02:13:09 +0000

When I’ve researched this it’s turned out that among elite athletes it tended to be a bit higher since some of these intersex conditions can confer benefits

New comment by space_fountain in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

space_fountain — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 02:10:14 +0000

I read the statement as follows:

There is a category called woman, it’s defined by something that’s identify related.

Sports should only be segregated by this category, except that to remove perverse incentives it’s reasonable to require hrt

I’m unclear on what you find absurd about this?

New comment by space_fountain in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

space_fountain — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 23:19:32 +0000

Because then trans men will dominate the "women"'s category. What's frustrating about this entire subject is that many of these things were tried. After finding that too many cis athletes were being disqualified they switched to the current rules that in most cases split things based on testerone levels. You can choose to do it some other way, but all of them come with some problems that people won't like

New comment by space_fountain in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

space_fountain — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 23:17:02 +0000

But trans women aren't in anyway enhanced in their ability to compete?

New comment by space_fountain in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

space_fountain — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 23:05:06 +0000

I'm not asking for a double blind study. I'm asking for examples of someone who took puberty blockers, regretted it and stopped, and then went on to not be able to live the life they wanted to live. I'm not aware of any such stories and I'm pretty familiarly with the population of people who regret taking hormones. When I double checked with Claude it also failed to find anything accept the issue around bone density I mentioned.

There are plenty of studies that point to strong evidence that this protocol results in better mental health outcomes because for whatever potential consequence there is for delaying natural puberty, there are plenty of known irreversible impacts of allowing it to progress.

If you have other evidence, even just observational studies it would be good to share that.

And again the recommendation is to continue until 15 or 16, not until 18

New comment by space_fountain in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

space_fountain — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 22:28:52 +0000

You're making scientific claims, but with the only evidence that I'm aware of contradicting the claim. The usual approach with puberty blockers is prescribing them around the onset of natural puberty and one way or another stopping them around the age of 16. While there are sadly some cases of people who started hormone therapies and later regretted it, I'm aware of no cases of long term health impacts that are attributed to delaying puberty until 16. If you do know of some reports please let me know.

I asked Claude to see if it could find anything and the only reports it could find was some long term bone density issues, but only in trans women and it seemed potentially related to estrogen dosing

New comment by space_fountain in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

space_fountain — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 20:39:57 +0000

The article is saying that there are fairly credible denials no?

New comment by space_fountain in "OpenClaw: When AI Agents Get Full System Access. Security nightmare?"

space_fountain — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 23:18:06 +0000

I'm not sure that a prompt injection secure LLM is even possible anymore than a human that isn't susceptible to social engineering can exist. The issues right now are that LLMs are much more trusting than humans, and that one strategy works on a whole host of instances of the model

New comment by space_fountain in "Data centers in space makes no sense"

space_fountain — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 01:18:48 +0000

It's like this. Everything about operating a datacenter in space is more difficult than it is to operate one on earth.

1. The capital costs are higher, you have to expend tons of energy to put it into orbit

2. The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low

3. Refurbishment is next to impossible

4. Networking is harder, either you are ok with a relatively small datacenter or you have to deal with radio or laser links between satellites

For starlink this isn't as important. Starlink provides something that can't really be provided any other way, but even so just the US uses 176 terawatt-hours of power for data centers so starlink is 1/400th of that assuming your estimate is accurate (and I'm not sure it is, does it account for the night cycle?)

New comment by space_fountain in "Using secondary school maths to demystify AI"

space_fountain — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 18:12:28 +0000

It’s not that open. We can simulate smaller system of neurons just fine, we can simulate chemistry. There might be something beyond that in our brains for some reason, but it sees doubtful right now