Hacker News Reader

jakelazaroffon FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE

> The people in these groups are coordinating for a specific reason: to follow federal agents around, harass them, and prevent them from doing their jobs. That’s textbook Obstruction of Justice. It is illegal to prevent an officer from doing their job.

If that's the case, then why has no one been prosecuted on those grounds?

jakelazaroffon FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE

I think GP is speaking generally, not with regard to this situation specifically; obviously people have been charged for constitutionally-protected speech before.

jakelazaroffon ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data

Consider that many women… want to work? And some even want to work and have kids?

jakelazaroffon Man shot and killed by federal agents in south Minneapolis this morning

Sure, the article is not the clearest, but the "violently resisted" quote is taken verbatim from the DHS tweet.

Just visit the link I posted, this will take you two seconds to verify.

jakelazaroffon Man shot and killed by federal agents in south Minneapolis this morning

> Another source (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/man-tackled-by-ice-in-chao...) gives another claim from the same police chief:

>> "The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted. More details on the armed struggle are forthcoming."

You've misread your link. The "violently resisted" quote is from a tweet by DHS, not local police: https://xcancel.com/DHSgov/status/2015115351797780500

jakelazaroffon Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)

Sure, but the intent and effect is to give cops more leeway in using perceived ethnicity as a factor. In the full passage, he explicitly says that given the prevalence in LA of undocumented immigrants from Latin America working in particular jobs, local police are permitted to detain such workers who appear Latine (i.e. to racially profile them).

A fuller quote:

> To stop an individual for brief questioning about immigration status, the Government must have reasonable suspicion that the individual is illegally present in the United States ... Reasonable suspicion is a lesser requirement than probable cause and "considerably short" of the preponderance of the evidence standard ... Whether an officer has reasonable suspicion depends on the totality of the circumstances ... Here, those circumstances include: that there is an extremely high number and percentage of illegal immigrants in the Los Angeles area; that those individuals tend to gather in certain locations to seek daily work; that those individuals often work in certain kinds of jobs, such as day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction, that do not require paperwork and are therefore especially attractive to illegal immigrants; and that many of those illegally in the Los Angeles area come from Mexico or Central America and do not speak much English. To be clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court's case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a "relevant factor" when considered along with other salient factors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavanaugh_stop?wprov=sfti1#Sup...

jakelazaroffon CSS Web Components for marketing sites (2024)

Right, but the article isn't talking about defining complex behavior; it's talking about using custom element and attribute names as hooks for CSS. I don't think it's suggesting they be used in place of semantically meaningful elements like <p> or <button>, either; it's saying that you can use them instead of class names or data attributes.

jakelazaroffon Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)

I realize that "duress" probably has a specific legal definition, but colloquially speaking all plea bargains are made under duress. If I (a private citizen) kidnapped you, locked you in a cage and told you that I would continue to hold you captive if you didn't agree to my terms, no one would mistake that for a free or fair negotiation.

jakelazaroffon Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)

I don't see any such claim, but the idea that prosecutors correctly identify the perpetrator in 98% of cases is obviously pure fantasy.

jakelazaroffon Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)

You are the breadwinner for your household. A detective decides that you are the most likely person to have committed a nearby burglary. You have an alibi, but they charge you anyway. You cannot afford to pay bail; your options are to remain in jail until the case makes its way through the courts, or to accept a plea bargain that lets you out on probation. Your underfunded and overworked public defender advises you to take the deal, since a trial would be ruinous even if you do prevail. What do you do?

The issue with plea bargains is not that guilty people are given leniency for remorse; it is that they are used to coerce innocent people into confessing to a crime they did not commit.

jakelazaroffon Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)

As many as 98% of charges end with plea bargains [1]. That's not "due process" in a meaningful sense of the term.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158356619/plea-bargains-crim...

jakelazaroffon CSS Web Components for marketing sites (2024)

Using custom elements as the article suggests doesn't require JavaScript, so they are "pure" HTML and CSS (though whether they count as "web components" is up to you). More to the point, all of the technologies that the term "web components" includes — custom elements, <template> tags, shadow DOM — can be used without JavaScript.

<div> and <span> are semantically neutral, so I'm not sure what SEO and accessibility challenges custom elements would introduce?

jakelazaroffon Earth is warming faster. Scientists are closing in on why (2024)

The point is that sometimes I only realize I don't want to after I hit the "reply" button!

jakelazaroffon Earth is warming faster. Scientists are closing in on why (2024)

Eh, even when I understand what I'm talking about, sometimes I submit a comment and then instantly realize "you know what, I actually don't want to debate this with a random stranger on the Internet".

jakelazaroffon Crypto grifters are recruiting open-source AI developers

From the article:

> Bags seems to me to be offering crypto-airdrop-pump-and-dumps-as-a-service, where niche celebrities can turn their status as respected community figures into cold hard cash. The people who pay into this are either taken in by the pretense that they’re sponsoring open-source work (in a way orders of magnitude less efficient than just donating money directly), or by the hope that they’re going to win big when the coin goes “to the moon” (which effectively never happens).

Honestly, I think the first category is somewhere between "microscopic" and "nonexistent", but most people in the second category will end up holding the bag when this thing inevitably collapses.

jakelazaroffon Show HN: Tabstack – Browser infrastructure for AI agents (by Mozilla)

I apprehend that you want me to say the first one is worse, but it's impossible with so few details. Like: worse for whom? in what way? to what extent?

If (for instance) my content changes often and I always want people to see an up-to-date version, the second option is clearly worse for me!

jakelazaroffon ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

Pretty sure GP is saying that the data Palantir sells are commercial because they're being sold by Palantir.

jakelazaroffon Show HN: Tabstack – Browser infrastructure for AI agents (by Mozilla)

What's difficult to explain? If you're having an agent crawl a handful of pages to answer a targeted query, that's clearly not mass scraping. If you're pulling down entire websites and storing their contents, that's clearly not normal use. Sure, there's a gray area, but I bet almost everyone who doesn't work for an AI company would be able to agree whether any given activity was "mass scraping" or "normal use".

jakelazaroffon The Gleam Programming Language

Why couldn't you fix this by validating at the point of ingress? If one of the three transmissions fails, retry and/or alert the user.

jakelazaroffon The Gleam Programming Language

I think you can avoid most issues by not doing what you're describing! Ensuring data arrives uncorrupted is usually not an application-level concern, and if you use something like TCP you get that functionality for free.

jakelazaroffon The Gleam Programming Language

Interesting! I don't share that view at all — I mean, everything running locally is just bits too, right? Your CPU doesn't care about monads or integers or characters or strings or functors either. But ultimately your higher level code does expect data to conform to some invariants, whether you explicitly model them or not.

IMO the right approach is just to parse everything into a known type at the point of ingress, and from there you can just deal with your language's native data structures.

jakelazaroffon We can't have nice things because of AI scrapers

Sometimes! The server can also send a retry-after header to indicate when the client is allowed to request the resource again: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...

jakelazaroffon Games Workshop bans staff from using AI

That's no different from any art. It's like saying that woodworkers' ethos is having low attachment to screws, or guitarists' ethos is having low attachment to picks. Code is a tool; the creative, human endeavor is making an artifact that people can perceive and interact with.

jakelazaroffon You are not required to close your <p>, <li>, <img>, or <br> tags in HTML

It doesn't indicate that, though. If you write <div />, for example, the content that follows is inside of the tag. So the reader still needs to remember how HTML works, because the slash does nothing.

jakelazaroffon You are not required to close your <p>, <li>, <img>, or <br> tags in HTML

How does the slash make it clearer? It's totally inert, so if you try to do the same thing with a non-void tag the results will not be what you expect!

jakelazaroffon You are not required to close your <p>, <li>, <img>, or <br> tags in HTML

The inert self closing syntax is misleading, though, because if you use it for a non-void element then whatever follows will be contained within the tag.

e.g. how do you think a browser will interpret this markup?

    <div />
    <img />

A lot of people think it ends up like this (especially because JSX works this way):

    <div></div>
    <img>

but it's actually equal to this:

    <div>
        <img>
    </div>

jakelazaroffon You are not required to close your <p>, <li>, <img>, or <br> tags in HTML

You cannot nest <li>. An <li> may only be a child of <ol>, <ul> or <menu>.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

jakelazaroffon A super fast website using Cloudflare workers

"At the edge" means "on a server located close to where you are". It's used to serve the HTML.

Looks like the only JavaScript running on the client is for installing the service worker and some Cloudflare tracking junk.

jakelazaroffon Toll roads are spreading in America

That article also doesn't support your assertion. For example, they specifically call out parking minimums and minimum lot sizes (both density-lowering regulations) as major drivers of high housing costs.

jakelazaroffon Replacing JavaScript with Just HTML

Luckily things are slowly changing for the better. You can actually style a <select> now! Browser support is still scant but it'll gracefully degrade to a normal looking <select>. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_developme...