Hacker News: throwaway_2898

Ask HN: Local community first approach to building an age verification system

throwaway_2898 — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 13:59:55 +0000

Recently discord rolled out verification of age and IDs in their announcement https://www.theverge.com/tech/875309/discord-age-verification-global-roll-out

I had a very dead simple idea which was to Do age verification combining two systems that are well known, one is the local notary public and the other a cryptographic authz,auth to do so.

An example of a system is this say you want your age verified, a number of local authorities like teachers, lawyers, DMV, notary can be authorized to verify ages of people in the community. When a person goes to get there age verified they can present them with the cryptographic hash — which they got from a hash —that this authority figure can pass on to a central server, The hash will contain no private information except for the fact that there is some service that wants to verify a claim: is the user > 18. The authority figure looks at this ID and just sends a yes/no signal back to the server asking for this. No id/PII is ever exchanged.

Then maybe some problems I can see with such a system, but nothing on the scale of how we do age and ID verification these days: storing IDs online in centralized enterprise servers which have so many threat actors acting against them.

Does something like this exist already or is someone building such a thing?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46959801

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by throwaway_2898 in "GPT-5"

throwaway_2898 — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 22:33:37 +0000

TBH Claude Code max pro's performance on coding has been abhorrent(bad at best). The core of the issue is that the plan produced will more often than not use humans as verifiers(correctness, optimality and quality control). This is a fundamentally bad way to build systems that need to figure out if their plan will work correctly, because an AI system needs to test many plans quickly in a principled manner(it should be optimal and cost efficient).

So you might get that initial MvP out the door quickly, but when the complexity grows even just a little bit, you will be forced to stop and look at the plan and try to get it to develop it saying things like: "use Design agent to ultrathink about the dependencies of the current code change on other APIs and use TDD agent to make sure tests are correct in accordance with the requirements I stated" and then one finds that even the all the thinking there are bugs that you will have to fix.

Source: I just tried max pro on two client python projects and it was horrible after week 2.

New comment by throwaway_2898 in "GPT-5 for Developers"

throwaway_2898 — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 18:20:35 +0000

How much of the product were you able to build to say it was good/reliable? IME, 70 hours can get you to a PoC that "works", building beyond the initial set of features — like say a first draft of all the APIs — does it do well once you start layering features?

New comment by throwaway_2898 in "Show HN: I made a tool to port tweets to Bluesky mantaining their original date"

throwaway_2898 — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 16:54:13 +0000

And its why I am posting from a throwaway account as well.

New comment by throwaway_2898 in "Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads"

throwaway_2898 — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:00:17 +0000

Posting here from an anonymized account about Meta. No one probably recalls that meta stopped most of their background location services(Remember Nearby Friends) on the main application ~2021-2022[1]. It was just not even worth a repeat NYT story with this much money on infra to collect locations.

But, this is basically after they figured how to do "good enough" location targetting using IP and a bunch of this info this guy talked about. You don't actually need a lat, long, just the 1 mile radius/city area is good enough to run ads and they have ALL of that.

This was why meta's revenue dropped so much after apple's move, they could not fall back to collecting precise location. This is the last game in town. You shut this down, meta's precise targetting will suffer gravely, ads will become flakey.

One last thing. You may ask, who are the businesses that need precise lat longs? are like this one[2]. These businesses are like whack-a-mole. They saturate the app market steal data get money and shit down when someone yells and in a few months and comeback again, rebranded and come back as another app. They exist not just to collect data but to act as an arbiter on who get eyeballs on IRL activities to influence behavior at the (Top of the funnel) TOFu. In the Worst. Possible. Way.

[1] https://techcrunch.co/2022/05/09/facebook-to-shutter-its-nea... [2] https://www.joinpogo.com/