Hacker News Reader

e_i_pi_2on Ousted Savannah police officer gave ICE agent husband access to Flock system

This was also surprising to me, I'd think the firing would be automatic and then it'd be a legal case about unauthorized access of govt computers, which is generally taken pretty seriously.

You can't make the same argument with financial systems by giving someone at a different bank access to your bank just because you're both "financial professionals", and that's arguably much less sensitive data.

e_i_pi_2on Remote workers report the highest well-being in study of 7,700 employees

I know of a company where they want anyone within 90m to commute, so that's up to three hours lost in a day, making an 8 hour workday actually 11+ hours

e_i_pi_2on Jimothy the raccoon has a rare spinal condition. Here's what that means

This does seem like an unfortunate truth of life, I always want to loan friends money, but can't afford to if they keep not paying me back :/

I also want to put a bird feeder outside a window we have, but I know that'll mean bird poop on a walkway that other people use

Same with some technology, I want to use X because it seems better but I know that'll mean it won't get the same support as Y so we have to use Y

e_i_pi_2on Jimothy the raccoon has a rare spinal condition. Here's what that means

I do this too, but it's important to make sure you're either fully adopting them to keep them inside and care for medical issues, or at least make sure they get neutered/spayed before they're let out again if they can't live indoors. Stray cats are terrible for the local ecology- just feeding them without taking those steps is definitely harmful. In my town you can call animal control for strays and they'll clip the ears so you can see that they can't reproduce and are safe to leave out.

I'd also be hesitant to give people the idea that racoons are safe to interact with, even stray cats can be dangerous, but racoons can do much more damage. I feel like the ideal situation is they capture him and find an animal sanctuary away from the public. Wild animals with genetic issues don't usually live a great life

e_i_pi_2on The Strongest El Niño Ever

Do you know if this balances out to a lower death count than the heatwave would have, or just better for people in that area? Even thinking just about the US south I'd imagine heat is a bigger risk than hurricanes

e_i_pi_2on OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future

I'd argue that the "rampant cynicism and nihilism" and more a result of the environment than algorithms manipulating people, the content is also made by other people, and it just serves up what people want. Your feed is often just a reflection of what you're feeling since everyone has their own feed instead of the reddit or HN approach with a shared feed. Also the phrase is that a few bad apples spoil the batch, nobody cares about the rest of the batch until you can get rid of the bad ones

I'm much more a descriptivist than prescriptivist so if there's a pattern among people I'm inclined to think it's a true issue instead of people just thinking "wrong" en-masse

e_i_pi_2on Do YC companies get preference on the homepage?

Ah thank you! Sorry didn't know about those, I do still think they should keep it off the homepage but if that's their policy then that's their prerogative haha

e_i_pi_2on Starlink 2X Price Increase

Agreed with this, and it also doesn't seem like this is the case but I'm generally a fan of charging B2B as high as possible to lower costs for regular consumers - other companies will generally pay a lot more even if it just includes the potential of getting better support, and that profit can be used to give access to more people at a lower price.

A lot of open source software uses this model - free for everyone, but if you're a company that wants support then you have to pay for it, and that covers the development for everyone

e_i_pi_2on GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

I don't think this is literally true, but as an example an employee might not justify their wage in a single quarter but have a huge impact over time. In the short term firing them makes the company more profitable, but that's definitely not a good way to run a business. Everything is gambling now :/

e_i_pi_2on Isopods of the world

There's definitely photos, check your ad-block or maybe try on your phone

e_i_pi_2on OpenAI backs Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable

This is what I'd expect from companies - I don't see why Facebook would get money because they helped people connect to each other who ended up developing a cancer cure, but they definitely should be held accountable for enabling a genocide. You're allowed to operate a business until you cause harm to society, then we can shut it down.

I think the big thing you would need is to see the internal emails - if there was ever a case where someone raised a concern about this possibility and it wasn't taken seriously, then they should be liable. If they just never thought about it then it could be negligence but I think if I was on a jury I'd find that more reasonable than knowing it could be a problem and deciding you aren't responsible

e_i_pi_2on My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix

We've also seen this within the US - California generally makes the first move and then companies just follow that law because they know others might change and it's easier than doing it by state. One relatively small law can have a big impact, we also follow GDPR in the US because a lot of companies operate in europe too

e_i_pi_2on I'm not worried about AI job loss

A lot of this can be provided or built up by better documentation in the codebase, or functional requirements that can also be created, reviewed, and then used for additional context. In our current codebase it's definitely an issue to get an AI "onboarded", but I've seen a lot less hand-holding needed in projects where you have the AI building from the beginning and leaving notes for itself to read later

e_i_pi_2on Show HN: Ever wanted to look at yourself in Braille?

Not blind, and can't speak to how popular or useful they are, but there are products meant to be used like that [0]. I can't find the link but I've also seen this done with paintings, where someone creates essentially a sculpture based on a painting, and then they can 3D print it so a blind person could "see" something like the Mona Lisa or Starry Night.

A while ago I read a biography of Louis Braille, and he created his system to replace an older one where they would teach people to feel the shape of letters in wooden blocks. Braille replaced it because it was much easier to read fast, but it was never meant to be used for something like a picture.

I'd also be interested if something like a tactile floor plan would even be useful for someone blind from birth, from what I've heard you don't think about navigating spaces the same way, so a floor plan might be far away from the mental models they use.

[0]: https://evengrounds.com/services/tactile-3d-printed-models-f...

e_i_pi_2on We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

Anecdotally, I have used SO much less in recent years, but I think a lot of what gets labelled as toxicity is just dedicated curation. I remember asking my first question - I got a quick response that it wasn't well written and was likely a duplicate, and they were totally correct.

The next time I asked I made sure to put the work in beforehand to make sure it was well written and included any relevant info that someone would need, as well as linking potential duplicates and explaining the differences I had to them. That got a much better response and is more useful for future readers.

e_i_pi_2on Anthropic irks White House with limits on models’ use

I'm sure this sort of unofficial blacklisting is fairly common, but it does seem very opposed to the idea of a free market. It definitely doesn't seem like Anthropic was trying to make some sort of point here, but it would be cool if all the AI companies had a ToS saying it can't be used for any sort of defense/police/military purposes

e_i_pi_2on We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own

> It’s nuts that personal computers aren’t personal anymore

I think the core driver here is that most people don't want a "personal" computer, they want a device that's able to reliably accomplish tasks. Early computers gave users much more power and control but that also came with the responsibility to set up and maintain the system, which limited the userbase a lot. I'd argue a lot of the security is security from the user against themself - there is definitely some value in trying your best to make sure a user is unable to brick their phone no matter how much they try, because they're likely going to blame you and ask you to fix it afterwards

e_i_pi_2on We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own

I know it's not quite the point of the article, but just to push back on the phrase

> I should be able to run whatever code I want on hardware I own

There's a few cases where this definitely seems wrong - you can own a radio transmitter but it's super illegal to broadcast in certain frequencies. So while you're "able" to in the sense that's in physically possible, you're not "able" to because it's illegal, and I think most people would want it that way.

In a similar way, it's illegal to modify your car or especially guns in certain ways. I could see a similar argument saying "I own this machine, I should be able to modify it mechanically however I want". Yes you own it, but as soon as you bring it in the world then you also need to account for how it's going to impact everyone else. You can't even manufacture certain hardware on your own without the right approval.

If it's "I should be able to run whatever code I want on hardware I own if I accept the risks of doing so" then that seems more balanced, but also doesn't seem too desirable because you're adding more footguns into the world that average consumers wouldn't want to run into accidentally

e_i_pi_2on American sentenced for helping North Koreans get jobs at U.S. firms

I'd hope that it's not a significant fraction that would get it backwards haha but just to clarify - homelessness/poverty will cause people (on average) to make worse decisions and lower cognitive ability, but making bad decisions or having a lower cognitive ability is not a cause of homelessness/poverty, at least from a statistical causality perspective on a population, individual cases will of course be different

e_i_pi_2on American sentenced for helping North Koreans get jobs at U.S. firms

OP does address why it's critical:

> Not that we need to re-litigate that homelessness as a national security issue

Without this it's easy to think that this was just a bad actor we could have caught, instead of just a symptom of a deeper issue not being addressed

I'd be more surprised if there isn't a causal link between homelessness and making bad choices - I don't think it's really disputed that there's a causal link between homelessness and crime in general.

e_i_pi_2on No Hello

> being hard with people that just say hello just doesn't make much sense to me anymore

This is the problem I run into, I want to just reply to any "Hey" message with a link to this page, but then I'm the one being rude. We just need a better way to let other people know that this isn't a good way to do async chat. I've heard of other people making their status message this site, so then people see it when they go to message you and it doesn't have to be explicitly brought up

> If the worst they do to me is to say hello and never talk to me again, I'm ok with accommodating this in my daily workflow

This I can't really get behind, because if they just send a hello it's implied that I then need to follow-up and find out what they were asking about

e_i_pi_2on So Much Blood

On the other side, it is legal to pay donors where I am, but then it makes it feel like a waste to donate because you could be getting paid for it

e_i_pi_2on I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

Even worse - it's sold to the lowest bidder so they can sell it back to you for profit. This is a perfect example of why GDP isn't a good measure for how well a country is doing - if the kids do it themselves they may learn a bunch and enjoy it and make their lives better, but it doesn't create jobs or profit, so the incentives are against it.

e_i_pi_2on 'Dogequest' Site Claims to Dox Tesla Owners Across the U.S.

Does anyone know the URL for the actual site? Seems weird to write about a website and not link to it, and searching for it just brings up more articles that don't link to the site

e_i_pi_2on The Peppermills of Jens Quistgaard

https://web.archive.org/web/20241228230216/http://quistgaard...

Site wouldn't load for me, here's an archive version

e_i_pi_2on Show HN: I made a mini golf in my lunch time

To add:

You might need to zoom out a bit to see the whole map, the hole was hidden for me initially

e_i_pi_2on Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline

They are owned and operated by unfriendly actors with no allegiance to the government - they just need to be profitable. If there was a publicly owned and operated alternative I would feel better about that, but for example Facebook has been shown to experiment with their algorithm and increase depression rates in the past. If the argument is that the US should own/operate it then I'm not opposed to that because we could remove the profit incentive, but then meta/snapchat would have to become parts of the government instead of independent companies, and with them already being global I don't see how that would actually be implemented. Right now the proposal is to continue letting them do all the harm and data collection, so the reasoning for the change doesn't match up with the actions being taken.

e_i_pi_2on Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline

Good clarification - I'm not saying we're adopting all the same policies, but it is a step in that direction, and I think we need to have a clear line saying we never do anything close to that. Similar to the "first they came" poem, this could be used to justify further expansion of this power, and that poem does start with "First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist"

e_i_pi_2on Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline

I agree with point #1, but then this ban should also include the US controlled sites - having the main office in the US doesn't mean the data is any more secure, or that the products do less harm socially.

For point #2, this seems like you're saying "they don't have a leg to stand on, and we want to do the same thing". If we don't support the way they control the internet, we shouldn't be doing adopting the same policies. I don't think governments should have any ability to control communication on the internet, so this feels like a huge overstep regardless of the reasons given for it

e_i_pi_2on Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline

> this decision is not an emotional one but for the nation, just like the opposite party does for its nation

I'd argue that it is an emotional decision for both, and it does seem ironic that the US would be following China in restricting a platform that people see as a major tool for free speech. Whether you agree with that or not the optics are terrible, and the users are very aware of it. If this is really a big concern then they would also ban facebook/instagram/snapchat, but they aren't being included in this, despite having a worse track record.