Hacker News Reader

helsinkiandrewon My City Just Banned Flock After My Wrongful Stop Made National News

The original stop story seems like a data entry problem that would/could have happened without Flock - wouldn't a stolen car/plate be entered in the FBI National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database and looked up by a cop elsewhere resulting in the same stop? Perhaps not as quickly.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-flock-cameras-wrongly-trac...

> A simple data-entry error, magnified and broadcast nationwide by a growing surveillance network operated through an opaque partnership between a private company and public agencies, led police to identify me as a car thief and set up a sting to take me down.

helsinkiandrewon California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops

If so its been going on for a long time. I remember seeing UK TV ads in the 70's/80's for Paul Mason's Californian Carafes - cheap/mainstream wine. Now I'd say most American wines for sale in Europe are higher end and more expensive.

If you want a cheap bottle of wine it would be New Zealand, Chilean or Spanish

helsinkiandrewon How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments

> I now shifted to in-person interactions with a TA. After every assignment, each student needs to schedule a 15-minute meeting with a TA to answer a couple of questions in a live conversation

Isn't the answer the 'flipped classroom' - students are assigned reading/studying to do before a class and the class becomes more interactive, answering questions/discussing topics/solving problems etc depending on subject. Of course, this is more expensive than a hall with 400 people listening to a lecture with a couple of tests/essays.

https://fltmag.com/the-flipped-classroom/

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

helsinkiandrewon Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space

> Announced last year, Project Suncatcher is a long-term, research moonshot exploring whether space could one day host scalable machine learning infrastructure

It’s very confusing to have a project related to space called a moonshot project.

helsinkiandrewon Nokia Design Archive (2025)

> and it was now time to lay back and just try out random shit

To be fair we hadn't yet decided that phones should be a flat tablet with a screen on one side that ran apps - they were mostly for calling (possibly sending messages) and were being sold to everyone from subsistence farmers to western teenage girls who had vastly different requirements/desires - there were bricks, clamshells, flip-phones, camera phones, phones with changeable coloured covers.

helsinkiandrewon Nokia Design Archive (2025)

More discussion from 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42721915 (58 comments)

helsinkiandrewon Anthropic Is Suing Meta

Surely about 50% of Japanese baby faced cartoon characters count as prior art?: Molang, Dango Daikazoku, Sumikko Gurashi, Anpanman

helsinkiandrewon Apple Music to open concert venue in Battersea Power Station

If you like Art Deco and get get a chance to visit Control Room A, do so:

https://batterseapowerstation.co.uk/retailers/control-room-a...

helsinkiandrewon Dropbox's Jan 1st 2027 terms of service

At least they claim they will give 'reasonable advance notification':

> We’ll provide you with reasonable advance notice via the email address associated with your account to remedy the activity that prompted us to contact you and give you the opportunity to export Your Stuff from our Services. If after such notice you fail to take the steps we ask of you, we’ll terminate or suspend your access to the Services.

helsinkiandrewon Porsche puts wireless EV charging into production

> not to charge fully at home, e.g overnight, which is what Porsche aims for.

Wouldn't an overnight (usually cheaper) 10+ hour charge be a great use for (slow) 11 kW charging?

helsinkiandrewon Nuclear Fusion's Moment of Truth

> "We will not, in no universe, have 50 megawatts hit full operation in 2028," Helion public affairs director Jackie Siebens said

https://www.axios.com/pro/climate-deals/2026/09/08/helion-en...

helsinkiandrewon Claude couldn't hack OpenAI. Then Anthropic shipped Opus 5

So it went:

> HEIF upload → libheif overflow → code execution on the forum → over-permissioned SSO tokens → employee ChatGPT/Codex account → connected GitHub → pull request in openai/openai

Server side bounties aren't that profitable though:

> A two-month project, under $3,000 in model tokens .... OpenAI paid Hacktron a $6,500 bounty for the account-takeover flaw on its side.

The ideal hacker workflow would be to gain access to an account or system with model access which you can use for further hacks.

helsinkiandrewon Nuclear Fusion's Moment of Truth

> It is getting a lot closer than many people realize

Even Commonwealth Fusion Systems say it will be early 2030s before they produce commercial power and have a target of about $50/MWh - which is only marginally less than existing average US nuclear power prices.

helsinkiandrewon PCB is brought to you by Fable 5

> Upon Claude's compilation of the project, I asked it to prepare the required files for JLCPCB, and tell me what to select on their GUI

It would be an interesting step to get Claude (or other LLM) to do order the PCBs itself on the JLCPCB website.

We're nearly at the stage where you can describe what a device should do, let it design the circuit (using available components on JLCPCB), design a PCB and enclosure then order PCBs, assembly and 3d printed enclosure and get it sent to you for final assembly.

helsinkiandrewon I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea

Jared Diamond (not sure which book - perhaps Guns, Germs and Steel) makes the claim that it was because areas were productive enough that people didn't need to move and also heavily protected from other incursion from other tribes - travelling outside your groups territory or meeting a group of people you didn't know was effectively suicide. So although there was occasional trade - no people or knowledge was transferred - which explains why there's over 1000 (very different) languages.

helsinkiandrewon Volkswagen Just Built an EV That Can Go Nearly 900 Miles on a Charge

Perhaps better info on VWs own press release:

https://www.volkswagen-newsroom.com/en/press-releases/missio...

This is concept car that has no planned release date.

helsinkiandrewon The little holes in your bread are telling you something

You were half way there!

> The guiding principle of the Chorleywood Bread Process (I’m paraphrasing, of course) is that instead of depending for the most part on fermentation to generate all those bubbles of CO2 that later become the “cell structure” of microscopic holes in a loaf of bread, something similar could be achieved by beating that dough to within an inch of its life in a massive mechanical mixer.

It's much the same for all soft (tin) loaves sold across Europe. The exception being breads with crusts - baguettes and rolls etc. and rye bread.

helsinkiandrewon Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants

The (naive or forward thinking depending on your opinion) is that cheaper 'inference' will result in more demand, like the more efficient Watt steam engine increasing consumption of coal.

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

helsinkiandrewon Bending Spoons Agrees to Buy Miro for $1.36B

> Hmm, did not know Miro was in the sh*tter

I think Bending Spoons buys companies that are profitable with a good customer base but have perhaps lost growth - it provides investors an off ramp when a successful IPO isn't likely, or revenues/profits/share price of a listed company is dropping.

helsinkiandrewon OpenAI Gives US Agencies 50% Off Models, Ending $1 per Year Deal

Year one costs a dollar, year two is half price, and by year three nobody remembers how to write a memo without it.

> OpenAI is ending a pilot program that allowed government agencies to use its models for only $1 per year and moving to a usage-based pricing system that will give federal workers access to the technology at a 50% discount from standard prices

helsinkiandrewon Rivian's gambit for full autonomy

> Isn't Tesla already there?

Those operate in constrained areas of a few cities though - with a control room, that's a long way from telling your car to drive across state unattended.

helsinkiandrewon EU and Canada Plan Far-Reaching Alliance to Strengthen Partnership

Gift article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-08/eu-and-ca...

helsinkiandrewon John Margolies' photographs of roadside America

> Communism: everything must be “modern”, bland, and sterile

Have you ever seen the Moscow Metro?

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/oct/31...

helsinkiandrewon Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

> I only counted companies that actually run a CDN. If a company serves its site straight from its own origin, it is not in these numbers at all

Doesn't this miss websites that serve their own site html but serve (static) assets from a CDN.

This seems to be a common pattern with Wordpress sites, presumably because it makes cache configuration simpler

helsinkiandrewon We have a year to fix security everywhere

> If this claim had any truth to it you'd see significant gun involvement in neighbour disputes

That’s not what I’m saying, I’m saying there’s more likely to be gun involvement in disputes when people have easy access to guns than when they don’t.

For example, when the number of men with service arms fell by 20% the number of men killing themselves dropped by 8%

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328554995_Suicide_b...

helsinkiandrewon We have a year to fix security everywhere

> That information is easily available other places

Often ease of access in the moment is all that matters. If there's a gun nearby you might shoot someone or yourself in a heated argument, but are less likely to go and find/buy one to use. Someone who's stopped from attempting a suicide will likely not try again (70%)

A bored/depressed/angry/curious person might try to build a pipe bomb if they can find out how easily, but are less likely to put in effort.

helsinkiandrewon No constitutional right to clean water, federal court finds

> alleged that the city knowingly allowed residents to drink unsafe water.

Surely knowingly letting people drink lead contaminated water breaks other laws rather than their constitutional rights?