MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simonw | 2025-11-20 20:28:56+00:00
License plate scanners are one of the most under-appreciated violations of personal privacy that exist today.

It's not just government use either. There are private companies that scan vast numbers of license plates (sometimes by driving around parking lots with a camera), build a database of what plate was seen where at what time, then sell access to both law enforcement and I believe private investigators.

Want to know if your spouse is having an affair? Those databases may well have the answer.

Here is a Wired story from 2014 about Vigilant Solutions, founded in 2009: https://www.wired.com/2014/05/license-plate-tracking/

I believe Vigilant only provide access to law enforcement, but Digital Recognition Network sell access to others as well: https://drndata.com/about/

Good Vice story about that: https://www.vice.com/en/article/i-tracked-someone-with-licen...
by jabroni_salad | 2025-11-20 20:29:32+00:00
They did not ticket me so there is no day in court. Chatting you up, seeing everything visible through the windows, leaning in to smell your car, running your license for warrants are all "free" interactions with no oversight.

The fun doesnt stop there, check out 'civil asset forfeiture' when you have a chance.

Also, if you read TFA, it seemed like the owner of a truck and trailer had to spend $20k getting his stuff out of impound when his employee was wrongly arrested. Seems like an innocent judgement isnt everything we think it is.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-11-20 20:29:59+00:00
You’ll have to let me know when that has ever really happened. I can’t recall a single government in my lifetime that didn’t push some remarkably stupid and irresponsible nonsense.

People my age probably remember the classic 90s “food pyramid” in school and on the back of sugared cereal boxes — it pushed empty carbs as the the foundation of a healthy diet.
by elmerfud | 2025-11-20 20:30:09+00:00
I can't answer specifically for their reasons but the general reason for things like this is regulations and compliance. There is a whole pile of compliance and regulations depending on your company and industry and funding and all kinds of nonsense you have to go through when engaging with companies outside of the US or employing people outside of the US. Some industries and companies never have to worry about it but others they might have to worry about it and some definitely have to worry about it. So it is oftentimes easier to just lump everyone together and say you must be in the US or you must be a US citizen. Then the compliance regulations can get a lot easier.
by tguedes | 2025-11-20 20:30:20+00:00
The only downside of this in the US is that homeless people will tend to hang around Aldi's asking people if they can return their cart to get the coin. Most of them are friendly and thankful but every once in awhile an aggressive person would make me very uncomfortable.

I also expect Aldi management isn't thrilled about homeless people camping outside their stores.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-20 20:30:53+00:00
> she told me the simplest option was to evict him and then if he refused to leave to call them back and they could help enforce the order.

Right, so you didn't have to follow the eviction process. This is a key distinction. If you tell someone they're no longer welcome and they have to move out immediately, you're not technically following the eviction process. If the person had refused to leave, you'd have to follow the eviction process which can require some evidentiary collection, such as being able to prove that the person was notified that they were being evicted on a certain date.

In extreme cases (not like your ex-roommate) squatters will go so far to game the system that they only come and go in the middle of the night to avoid being officially served the eviction notice.
by amluto | 2025-11-20 20:31:01+00:00
boggle

I’m not a golang programmer, but I find this quite bizarre. Sure, C++ arrays are awful and even std::array may not be able to legally alias a vector. But Rust (no surprise) gets this right — there is a properly fallible conversion from slice reference to array reference.

But I guess Go doesn’t. This seems silly to me.
by lll-o-lll | 2025-11-20 20:31:35+00:00
> Bluey isn't reaching development milestones when he should be

She should be. Bluey and Bingo are sisters.

The show is extremely good, and when my kids were around that age, we all watched together. Hard to explain to your 6 year old why you are bawling your eyes out, but it does lead to some important conversations. It’s also an inspiration to be a better parent, particularly for Dads. Thank you Bandit.

I don’t know if any of this stuff will hit if you aren’t a parent. It hits right into the heart of all those things people tell you “you can’t understand if you don’t have kids”.

It’s an objectively good show though, I found myself watching it even when the kids weren’t around. There are still some episodes I can’t watch; but you’d need to have had those experiences to understand.
by eddiemac24 | 2025-11-20 20:31:45+00:00
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by andy99 | 2025-11-20 20:31:59+00:00
The problem with lots of laws, often poorly thought out or framed, is that anyone can be breaking them any time, allowing law enforcement to target people or groups they don’t like with impunity. Drug laws are an obvious one, but so are traffic laws (with ever more rules about distracted driving etc, “drunk” driving ), things like loitering, all the stupid anti-free speech laws in places like the uk.

People get whipped up to support laws but don’t see that more is just worse, especially the petty ones, even if they notionally correct for some bad behaviour, because they allow selective enforcement.
by nabla9 | 2025-11-20 20:32:38+00:00
> (really good Penn State law review article on that thread)

Yes, and what it says is this:

>The Supreme Court has decided that there is a reduced expectation of privacy at the border, holding that the government’s interest in monitoring and controlling entrants outweighs the privacy interest of the individual. Thus, routine searches without a warrant, probable cause, or reasonable suspicion are considered inherently reasonable and automatically justified in that particular context.32 Fourth Amendment rights are therefore significantly circumscribed at the border, and CBP is given an expansive authority to randomly—and without suspicion—search, seize, and detain individuals and property at border crossings that law enforcement officers would not have in other circumstances.

The constitution free, means that constitutional rights are reduced within the area.
by Tiktaalik | 2025-11-20 20:32:39+00:00
SROs still a thing in Vancouver as well, though kettled into an ever smaller and smaller part of downtown. There are similar attempts to preserve them. You cannot rezone an existing SRO to a not-SRO, for the obvious reason that this would be an incredible windfall for the speculator that would achieves this.

But then there's the downside in that if there is significant maintenance, and these are 100+ year old buildings so there probably is, well where does the money come from?

I do not see any good path out of this short of the government stepping in, buying them or providing non profits the loans to buy them.

I'm unsure if there is any real path for someone to create a new SRO. As I mentioned before, 1930s era exclusionary zoning largely limited their existence, and the severe increase in land values since then has probably made for-profit low income housing very unviable.
by Greed | 2025-11-20 20:33:05+00:00
As I'm sure the author now realizes: truly elite skill among those working in the trades is in wildly high demand as compared to what someone might expect coming from the software industry.

If just 1% of all software developers are writing near-flawless code to spec, that's still about 287,000 people in the world. They're relatively accessible and the chances of you being able to work with one on a short timetable is actually pretty high.

By comparison: GC's, architects, builders at that level are far, far more rare by the numbers + highly localized + are usually mired in many years-long projects simultaneously. They do not need your business, are paid whatever price they ask, and are usually booked far in advance.

Even so! If you even get the hint that someone in that situation is willing to work with you it will save you far more time and money to wait for that person than to try going with someone available that you feel alright about. If they're readily available, it's because they are not in demand. Think about why that might be. If you can afford to, waiting for the person you actually want to work with is the better option every. single. time.
by bunderbunder | 2025-11-20 20:33:21+00:00
> For this to be true you'd have to believe that there are building owners out there who want to use their buildings as SROs but only if they can easily evict everyone and sell it.

Alternatively, it could be for the reason I speculated on in the very next paragraph. Which I think is more plausible because it doesn't assume someone's treating this as a wedge issue; it just assumes boring everyday human behavior. People and organizations preferring investments that they believe to be lower risk and/or higher return isn't particularly noteworthy. It's how I think about my retirement fund, for example.

Also note that I'm not talking about the landlord's ethos. I'm talking about the ease of securing financing for a real estate development project. I'd guess it's pretty uncommon for landlords to just plunk down cash on a project like that. Because people don't typically have that kind of money just sitting around in one neat pile of cash, all ready and waiting to be spent.
by vel0city | 2025-11-20 20:33:22+00:00
In the end people are being swept upt under what seems to be an obviously unconstitutional thing and yet the courts continue to shrug.

I agree with the Penn State Law Review analysis in your link. Sadly that's not the reality of the world we live in. You're burying your head in the sand pointing to a document that suggest how things should be compared to what has actually been happening. In the end, people are being stopped and nothing is being done about it. Some paper put out by a law review isn't ending the persucation that is happening no matter how hard you ignore it.

Words on some paper mean nothing compared to the actual actions of man.
by dylan604 | 2025-11-20 20:33:22+00:00
I'm confused. Are you saying they disassembled your car right there where you were pulled over? They had the tools on hand to do this? They didn't tow your car to a shop to have it searched? I've seen many many a car stop get searched by hand and/or with canine. Not once have I ever seen removal of seats/paneling/etc on the side of the road. So this is a bit much to take on first read without further questions
by aabhay | 2025-11-20 20:34:19+00:00
You choose which files to use in Poly, we don't scan your hard drive either.

I don't know about the other services, but Dropbox _does_ read your files. https://help.dropbox.com/security/privacy-policy-faq

> We may build models that identify keywords and topics from a given document. These models may be trained on your documents and metadata, and power features within Dropbox such as improved search relevance, auto-sorting and organization features, and document summaries.
by tetraodonpuffer | 2025-11-20 20:34:20+00:00
when it comes to Bach I am surprised more people don't mention pieces like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsxP-YjDWlQ (arioso from the cantata 156, here for oboe)

which I think stands up just fine against pretty much any other classical piece baroque or not.

Personally I have a very big soft spot for his organ works, as I play (badly) some organ myself, and among those I don't see the trio sonatas recommended nearly often enough (here is a live recital of all of them, which is super impressive)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK9irE8LMAU

among those I probably enjoy the most the vivace of BWV 530. Other favorite pieces are the passacaglia and fugue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVoFLM_BDgs the toccata adagio and fugue in C major https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Klh9GiWMc9U (the adagio especially is super nice), but there's so many. Among organists I often come back to Helmut Walcha, and am always amazed at how he was able to learn everything just by listening, him being blind.
by reconnecting | 2025-11-20 20:34:33+00:00
> I guess I have had "burnout" so long, that I cannot anymore feel it.

I've had every possible type of rejection: from banks, financiers, partners, accelerators and developers, over three years of 'booting up startup'. I joke that if I ever have an office one day, I'll print them all out and use them as wallpaper.

And after all I'm still at the very beginning.

I can give only one piece of advice: cold water. 7-10 minutes in the winter sea (<10°C) makes me feel normal. In Finland, probably 3 minutes will be fine. It may sound too obvious for being in survival mode, but any regular physical exercise somehow helps to works under startup pressure.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-20 20:34:42+00:00
> If a person abuses the shared kitchen, they get kicked out. This is a business.

Not any business, it's a landlord-tenant relationship.

You can't simply kick out a tenant. You have to do a formal eviction process. In many cities this requires collecting evidence of contractual breach, proving that the tenant was notified they were being evicted (such as through a paid service to officially serve and record delivery of the notice), and then following the appropriate waiting period and other laws. It could be months and tens of thousands of dollars of legal fees before you can kick someone out of a house.

Contrast that with the $213 inflation-adjusted monthly rent that the article touts. How many months of rent would they have to collect just to cover the legal fees of a single eviction?
by WorldMaker | 2025-11-20 20:34:44+00:00
As an atheist, I do find some use for the Jefferson Bible. (US Founding Father) Thomas Jefferson collected all the best parts of the Gospels, dropped the miracles, some of the stranger allegories, but kept all the sermons (the things Jesus was said to have directly taught). It's about 14 "letter" pages, so almost "pamphlet" sized. As far as I'm concerned it finds most of the baby in the bathwater (IMO, so much bathwater), is an easy read, and says some things much more succinctly that I think a lot of Christians might be surprised to find are core teachings of Jesus in the Bible.

I sometimes wonder what the country would be like if every hotel desk was more likely to have a copy of the Jefferson Bible than the Gideon Bible.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-11-20 20:34:45+00:00
I call it the lone programming language.

https://github.com/lone-lang/lone/

It's a lisp interpreter with zero dependencies targeting Linux exclusively.

I've written about a few of its development milestones:

https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/self-contained-lone-...

https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/delimited-continuati...

I'm particularly proud of my ELF hack to allow the interpreter to introspect into a lisp code section at runtime without any /proc/self/exe shenanigans. Wish other languages would adopt it.

Top comment and its replies talk about linking the lisp code into a self-contained, easily distributable application:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45989721

I think I addressed that problem adequately. I can create applications by copying the interpreter and patching in some special ELF segments containing lisp modules. The mold linker even added features to make it easy and optimal.

Since there is no libc nonsense, Linux compatibility depends only on the system calls used. Theoretically, applications could target kernels from the 90s.

My Linux system call philosophy:

https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/linux-system-calls

At some point I even tried adding a linux_system_call builtin to GCC itself but unfortunately that effort didn't pan out.
by vunderba | 2025-11-20 20:35:51+00:00
Definitely! Even though NB's predominant use case seems to be editing, it's still producing surprisingly decent text-to-image results. Imagen4 currently still comes out ahead in terms of image fidelity, but I think NB Pro will close the gap even further.

I'll try to have the generative comparisons for NB Pro up later this afternoon once I catch my breath.
by KetoManx64 | 2025-11-20 20:36:15+00:00
Yes, but then I'm going to have to manually go around my house and turn off all the lights when I leave the house and when I come back I have to turn them on manually instead of them just turning on when I open the door to a room. Also my AC/heating automatically turns off when I leave the house and turns on when I come back, my lights automatically dim/change to a warmer temperature in the evening as it gets closer to bed time, my desktop goes to sleep when I leave the house, my TV automatically turns on when I power on the living room media PC, etc. etc.
by hugkdlief | 2025-11-20 20:36:15+00:00
> we can imagine various creatures, say, a pig with a dragon head, even if we have not seen one ANYWHERE. It is because we can take multiple ideas and combine them together.

Funny choice of combination, pig and dragon, since Leonardo Da Vinci famously imagined dragons themselves by combining lizards and cats: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/03/59/ee/0359ee84595586206be6...
by lotsofpulp | 2025-11-20 20:36:30+00:00
I understood the post I responded to to be referring to the cause as the engine detaching from the same type of plane, not the root cause for why the engine detached. Per the “investigation section” in the wikipedia article, I would be surprised if it was the same root cause:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_191

I assume the erroneous maintenance procedures that led to the loss of AA191 were rectified a long time ago.
by root_axis | 2025-11-20 20:36:44+00:00
> That is why you see "folk magic", people love to share anecdata because.. that's what most people have. They either don't have the patience, the training or simply the time to approach these tools with rational rigor.

Yes. That's exactly the point of my comment. Users aren't performing anything even remotely approaching the level of controlled analysis necessary to evaluate the efficacy of their prompt magic. Every LLM thread is filled with random prompt advice that varies wildly, offered up as nebulously unfalsifiable personality traits (e.g. "it makes the model less aggressive and more circumspect"), and all with the air of a foregone conclusion's matter-of-fact confidence. Then someone always replies with "actually I've had the exact opposite experience with [some model], it really comes down to [instructing the model to do thing]".
by awesome_dude | 2025-11-20 20:38:32+00:00
You are bound to obey the legal orders/directions of your employer.

If you deem them to be illegal - the onus is on you to prove that, in a court of law, whilst you are unemployed because the employer sacked you for disobeying their instructions/orders

It's all cool to be on the internet saying things like that, but when it comes to reality, I DOUBT you would do anything other than acquiesce.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-20 20:38:41+00:00
> they would need to be able to vote to kick people out.

Not possible. Tenant laws are highly protective of the tenants. There is zero chance you could allow people to vote to kick another person out and not get immediately crushed by discrimination lawsuits.

Evictions also take a lot of time and legal fees. If you rent a room to someone and they break the contract you can't just kick them out. You have to follow the eviction process. Even if someone stops paying rent and tells you they're done paying, it could take months before you can actually evict them.
by asdefghyk | 2025-11-20 20:38:45+00:00
The link gives a error now. I google around and could not find the report.... got errors on other likely links For example got Server Error 403 - Forbidden: Access is denied. You do not have permission to view this directory or page using the credentials that you supplied.

ie Go to this page https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Pages/DCA26MA024.aspx

Click on " read the preliminary report" - right at bottom of the page ... does try to open another link but it gives an error ( now? I assume it worked in the past )
by gpjanik | 2025-11-20 20:38:54+00:00
There have been numerous cases of sanctioning and wealth confisactions (Afrghanistan, Venezuela, Iraq, Iran, Libya), and "_now_ carries confiscation risk" is just factually incorrect. It has always carried such risk, this risk has materialized numerous times, and most importantly, no diversification is happening - literally nothing changed: https://data.imf.org/en/news/4225global%20fx%20reserves%20de...

By the way, good luck with trusting China, Russia, or other places to store wealth more than Europe. It's total ignorance to believe there's somewhere safer to store your money than the West.
by lemonwaterlime | 2025-11-20 20:39:06+00:00
Yes, there is. It is called "Introduction to Microcontrollers" by Günther Gridling and Bettina Weiss from the Vienna University of Technology, written in 2007.

Unfortunately, it suffers from having a very generic name. It is short enough while going over concepts to take a person just beyond Arduino-land.
by LordGrey | 2025-11-20 20:39:44+00:00
I had an acquaintance who was a county constable. He once told me, "Let me watch you drive down the road, any road, for 30 seconds and I will be able to find a valid reason to pull you over." He implied that some part of their training was focused on exactly that.

One data point, and a highly regional one at that, I know.