cx42net

It seems that age verification (much like chat control) is getting more and more inevitable.

Instead of arguing on the bad this brings, we should push our authorities to enforce mechanism that still respect the anonymity of a person.

France's "France Identité" started to implement an approach that respect anonymity by using what they call a "double anonymity: a principle that ensures that neither the adult site nor the age-appropriate provider can know who is accessing what. Using advanced cryptographic technologies—digital signatures and zero-knowledge proofs—the system generates proof of age without revealing identity or browsing history." (source: https://entrevue.fr/en/police-justice/verification-dage-sur-...)

French's state should already have these informations from us (as a French citizen) so asking them to provide a certificate that guarantee my age seems like an obvious choice, and giving that digital certificate to any site without having to tell the issuer where I'm going is, I think, the best solution for the worst project.

(There a lot of news about this, but mostly in French. If you are curious:

- https://www.franceinfo.fr/societe/pornographie/l-arcom-impos...

- https://www.frandroid.com/culture-tech/web/2962099_france-id... )

Thank you for these links. Reading about pancognitivism and self sustaining closure is showing how complex the notion of consciousness can be, how its definition can vary from person to person. It also show how easy it can be for LLMs to give the illusion of consciousness when this is not clearly defined.

Thank you for your reply.

At first, I thought I had wrongly explained myself, so I checked what I wrote. Maybe it wasn't clear but I'm not looking for consciousness in the LLM era, but more about the philosophical research on what defines consciousness and the parallels that can be done with the LLMs era (parallels not in the sense of similitude, but in the sense of things that would appear similar but are not).

In a more generic and simple example, LLMs are good at producing language that resonates with us, and because of that, could be believed they have thoughts (they can write things like "I think you should .."), even thought they are not capable of thoughts, and are only producing the next logical word one after the other.

In the same sense, it would be interesting to read about philosophers that tried to define what consciousness is (or is not) and their age isn't relevant to today's LLM era. The connection can be done by the reader on what consciousness is, and what LLM is not, in the same vein as what thought and language is between our species and LLMs.

I'm not sure this more clear ^

I agree with you here, this is an odd reaction to a non-problem.

A real-life scenario would be to refuse your snail mail because someone added an extra line in your address.

The only plausible reason would be to avoid polluting the data (like faking the ref= for marketing purpose) but that would assume you are already tracking the ref value for other services, so in a way, you either need it or not, but you can't have both.

If you don't actively track query strings, having them or not has no impact.

France is currently working on a solution that provides age verification using double anonymity.

The "France Identité" use the identity card of the holder and generates a cryptographic proof of the age. The website wanting to check the age of the holder request the cryptographic proof, validates it against France's public key without querying government websites (that way, the government won't know you are trying to access pornhub).

This is, I believe, I concrete and working solution to age verification without having to provide any sensitive information to any website that will surely loose it in an breach.

Source (in French): https://www.frandroid.com/culture-tech/web/2962099_france-id...

Thank you for this clarification. I'm sad to learn I wasn't far from right on this.

So your whole point is the *hypothetical* "what if Bluesky turns bad".

And just with that hypothetical, you scratch the whole effort Bluesky is currently doing to offer an open protocol ? Which is the opposite of almost (Mastodon) all other social networks ?

Come on..

It honestly feel like this was written by someone being paid by a competitor, just to discredit the service.

Of course they will provide an infrastructure to ease users on to creating and using their service, they can't just provide an empty shell just for the pure purpose of decoupling the protocol and the service. You can't blame them for that (well, you can apparently..)

"Stack Overflow was multiplayer. A million developers contributing solutions that benefited everyone. We replaced it with a billion isolated sessions that benefit no one else".

This.

(Thank you!)

I've been working on https://DNSRadar.dev for the past three weeks now.

I had the need for such a service back when I was working on ImprovMX.com. The checking system I had implemented back then wasn't efficient and had a few false positive.

At the time, I thought the market for such a need was very low so I didn't bother, but now that I'm working on https://getfernand.com, I realize I also need it. And with the advent of more and more products thanks to AI and the enthusiasm around tech, the market is growing, so it might be worth the effort to release it as a side project.

I took it as a challenge, on two simultaneous front: Technical, and AI.

On the technical side, the aim is to have a highly efficient script able to process millions of DNS record at the lowest time possible. I had to rewrite the script a few times and see how I could optimize it, but my tests lands me at around 500 QPS for now.

I'm testing against Cloudflare's DNS, and I know they have a limit at 1500 QPS, so I can't go much higher (per server), but once I reach that limit, I'll grow horizontally.

For the AI side, my approach was as follow: Use a standard web framework (Sanic in my case), build the API with a proper database structure, and once I'm satisfied with it, ask Claude code to write the OpenAPISpec file.

Once I had it, I used Mintlify to write the doc for this, and the help of Claude to have nicely written guides (rate limit, authentication, etc). Then, I asked Claude to generate the landing page, and the dashboard system.

So, except for the API and the core of the service, the other parts was mostly written in AI (I fixed some issues, improved the code Claude gave me, but that's all).

Less than three weeks after, the service is almost ready to go live. I still need to clean the code in the Dashboard part, and finalize the touches on the API server, but it can be used already (and it's used by us at Fernand).

Feel free to share your comments :)

hum! That's an interesting point of view.

I agree that the best thing would be to buy all the various keyboard I hesitate, use them for a while, and finally decide which one is best ... but it's costly :p

Thanks! That was one idea yes. Unfortunately it appears they don't support AZERTY keyboard :/

Wow, thank you for all these. I didn't knew Incase picked up the Microsoft keyboard but that's a good news (too bad they haven't restarted the "Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000", this one was my absolute favorite!

One thing that makes me hesitant to buy one of these, is that I'm hoping that with one such as the Moonlander or the Glove80, I can replace the used part easily, which should cost less in the long run (but maybe I'm wrong here).

I saw that the rabbit hole is deep, and I don't want to fall into that one (already slipped a bit). I don't want to solder mine, so buying one already built (such as the glove80 or the moonlander) is already taking too much time for me.

Repairing mine is not possible, it's the wrist support that is worn out and it's glued to the keyboard...

Yeah, Glove80 is one I consider, along with the Moonlander.

Yeah I agree, the cost quickly rise!

For now, I'm highly hesitant to take a Glove80 with an extra keypad for the numbers, but I still hesitate with one of the original (Microsoft ergonomic desktop, Mobility lab ergo k30W or Logitech K860 ergo, even though most are wireless)

Ahah, thank you for this remark! It's better to know this in advance :)

I'm not a big fan of the navigation keys layout in this one personnally.

I've already spent quite some time looking up keyboards.

I think I've narrowed down to the following:

- Glove80

- Microsoft Ergonomic Desktop

- Perixx : PERIDUO-505

- Mobility Lab : Clavier Sans Fil Ergo K30W

- Kinesis MWave (It's QWERTY and I need an AZERTY but I believe I can move the keys around).

Funny you mention that, I was comparing Moonlander (https://www.zsa.io/moonlander), Glove80 (https://www.moergo.com/) and Cyboard (https://cyboard.digital/) ...

Thanks for the advice!

Thank you. I appreciate your warning on the fact that you are not a financial advisor :)

Thank you, I agree that having a second house means having double work to do and this is my main drawback. The holiday part is already something we are enjoying much, which is something I had a lot less as a kid so I'm happy to give that to my kids.

Thank you, that seems to make sense, and you are not the first one to tell me this too.

Outside property, what would you suggest to invest my money to? (I'm not a big fan of cryptocurrency)

(next part):

Option 4: Buy an appartment in a skiing station We are at about 4 hours drive of the French alps and we frequently go to the same place that we really appreciate. Buying a flat there would make sense but this one is on the extra budget (I would have to take a bank loan for about 45% of the price). But this could be rented, shared with the family. I could still go do some remote work isolated from time to time even though the drive would be longer, but the view would be much better. On the cons side, this might be a risk bet in the future because of climate change, I'm anticipating there could be a house crisis in these places when snow won't be there.

Pros: Renting - Can be shared with the family/kids - Can do remote work - Nice weekends too Cons: Cost! - A bit far away - Risk of house crisis that could kill the investment

Option 5: Buy a house in brittany! This is the most extravagant option. We live at the total opposite of Brittany. It takes around 1000km and 10 hours drive to go there, but we absolutely love the region. We frequently go on vacation there (but not at the same place) and I know this is a place I would love to have a house and share it with the family and kids, spend some nice time with them, etc. The big issue there is that we couldn't be present a lot, and any issues where we need to come would mean a lot of constraints (it takes one tiring day to go there).

Pros: Something I'd really love - Could be shared to the family and kids - Can be rented - Can do remote work there Cons: Too far away

---

These are the various options I'm considering, but all of these bring their cons that makes me stop and think they might not be the right choices. I'm also thinking about not investing in a house, but maybe acquire a SaaS project online and work on it, but I already manage two SaaS and they can be time consuming.

One disclaimer; I hope I don't come out as pretentious with my current situation. If that's the case I apologize. I know HN has quite a few people that are making a decent living and could have faced this situation in the past and I'm hoping to have some good advices on my choices before I make any stupid decision.

Thank you for your help !

Wow that's awful, borderline dystopia :D

Isn't called a tablet? ;)

The Lightphone seems great on paper, but price is far from light unfortunately, which is a bummer as I would have been interested if it were at 300$ selling price.

I've been running PDFShift.io, an API to convert HTML to PDF for seven years now. It's profitable (around $12K MRR) and still growing.

It took quite some efforts to have a service of really high quality, resilient and bug-free but I'm nearing this and it's a real pleasure.

To answer all your other points :

- What's your API: An API to convert HTML documents (URL/Raw) to PDF - How much MRR: About $12k - Pricing model: Subscription plan with limits in the number of converted documents that depends on the plan. The rest is the same for all the plans (no features unlocked at certain level). - First paying customers: Mostly from IndieHackers and Quora at the beginning, and a successful launch on ProductHunt when it was still big. - Problem I'm solving: Not having to manage your own servers to handle conversion. It can be done locally for sure, but as the service grow, the need for resources increases too and can lead to issues down the road. With PDFShift, it's just set up and forget it. - Biggest challenge: I was initially at OVH Strasbourg, when it caught fire, and lost a lot. I had to rebuilt the database from data I had around and gave access to everyone for free until I had all sorted up (took 2 days). This was a good lesson to learn to not save the backup on the same service and at the same place! - I would definitely do it again. (I'm thinking of this frequently for other services too :D)

Yeah! Me too! Been an avid reader of this newsletter for quite some years now!

Thanks @duck !

There are two (deep) thoughts about this article.

First, about using the "Lost password", saying “huh, I never thought about why” is an easy way out with not much of a research from the author (sorry). One of the main reason people do that is because websites are enforcing dumb rules for a password that user tend to repeat on every websites (Your password must be 16 chars long, with lower and upper case, numbers and special characters. No more than 2 identical characters in a row ... yes ... I'm looking at you Twilio.com). Of course in that scenario I'll hit my keyboard in a random way and never login using my password.

But this article leads to the alternative; login via email. Some HNers here have mentioned having implemented that on their website, either by sending a one-time login link, or a verification code by email. We did that too for ImprovMX.com initially, and it has a lot of advantages (no password, no password-lost flow, no security measures for storing the password, etc). But it turns out it also have quite a few downside that we haven't thought about:

1. Emails get lost. We had quite a few support request because users couldn't connect to our service because the login email never arrived. This is a major issue, mainly when user wanted to upgrade but couldn't because of that. If you decide to implement this, you must use a really good email provider (Postmark is really good. Mailgun, not so much) 2. Emails are async. When your user goes to your website, they want to connect now. Waiting for an email can take quite some time and they might loose focus 3. Security "measures" will tell you to not indicate if the email you entered is valid or not, to avoid listing your users (... I won't go in that); If you implement login by email, it means your user will enter their supposed email, you'll tell them something like "If your email is registered on our website, you'll receive a one time login link", wait what feels like an eternity to get the login email in their inbox, and at some point wonder if the email they entered was the right one. Will try another, wait, rince and repeat.

So yeah, relying on email move all the security issues and added workflow back to a trusted service (login/lost password/2FA/OTP/etc to services like Gmail) but it will definitely add friction too.

In the end, it depends on what service you offer.

You have a massive acquire opportunity here ...