Hacker News Reader

ooternesson 500k facial scans at UK stations yield no arrests, 1 false positive

Source please. This does not sound credible. How does scanning license plates stop people from breaking into parked cars?

ooternesson Flip Fluid on Flip Dots

The performer in the Eurovision video is "Look Mum No Computer", aka Sam James Bartle, who runs the museum that was the source for the flip-dot panels. There was a brief call-out near the start of mitxela's video.

ooternesson Toyota is taking the Corolla electric

Sorry, best anyone can do in 2026 is spyware on wheels.

ooternesson Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster

Is it perhaps time to ackowledge that cabinets where everyone is buddies can't actually do their jobs, yet they get given obscene amounts of power?

ooternesson The Amazon tax

Amazon has turned the search ranking into a contest for who can give Jeff Bezos the most money. How is that an improvement on anything?

ooternesson Heart aerospace completes first flight of largest electric aircraft

Megawatt-hours (MWh) are one billion times larger than milliwatt-hours (mWh).

ooternesson uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

This argument makes no sense, because the CPU and disk resources required to serve up a modern ad (and the megabytes of JavaScript that come with it) are 100-1000x more expensive than just serving up the content.

ooternesson Water system controllers don't belong on the internet, says ex-NSA chief

CISA was one of the first agencies gutted by the DOGE purge.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cybersecurity-agencys-top-recru...

ooternesson Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees

Agent Smith was right when he was explaining The Matrix. Human civilization peaked in the 90's.

ooternesson Californians' data deletion requests, DROP, become enforceable Aug. 1

I always liked the archaic form, "You are hereby requested and required to [insert naval orders here]." It's asking very politely, for now, but also making it clear that declining will result in jail or worse.

I don't know if it's apocryphal, but it shows up in the Hornblower novels and at least one episode of Star Trek.

ooternesson Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year

Buy a separate tablet and a roll of duct tape. If you're careful, you can completely cover whatever obsolete nonsense is built into the car.

ooternesson MAI-Cyber-1-Flash inside MDASH

All these different names and version numbers are too confusing. Just name every single model "Copilot". /s

ooternesson The small, real, original web

Previous discussion: "The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717469

ooternesson Em dashes are fucking amazing

You might enjoy this song by Lonely Island: https://youtu.be/M94ii6MVilw?si=VUEIm_VVEHQIn9Y3

ooternesson The social physics of conversation: Communication patterns matter

Energy and velocity are science terms because they have very specific meanings. If you use them in a completely different way, that's not science, that's just science-themed marketing vibes.

ooternesson The case for physical media ownership

If the disc is an abstract license, surely the seller will replace the disc if it's scratched. I already bought the license, so what is the real purpose of the physical token?

Somehow the concept of ownership has been twisted to so that obligations only flow in one direction. Rules for thee, not for me.

ooternesson Never Give Them Your Face

I was in a similar situation this year. Miapplied a rule, overpaid slightly, IRS owed a refund on the difference. It took a while, but they did eventually send me a physical check.

ooternesson Airlines Can't Charge You for What You Wear

Systems built into the landing gear do exist, but they're not very common. There are also ground-based systems (i.e., scale-on-a-cart for each wheel).

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/16307/how-does-...

ooternesson Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

Valuable, sure. Most valuable on Earth? Ridiculous.

ooternesson Everyone Against Us (2023)

Everybody gets the same constitutional rights, and for good reason.

If the cops can violate those rights at will, lie through their teeth to cover it up, and get away with it, then nobody has any rights.

ooternesson White Rabbit – sub-nanosecond synchronization for large distributed systems

Two-way time transfer measures the round-trip propagation time. As a result, it's not directly relevant to the accuracy.

ooternesson 4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

Functionally, biometrics are closer to a username than a password.

Fingerprints, DNA, iris scans, gait patterns, etc. are all something you can't change (much like a permanent account ID) and are constantly being presented to the world (much like an email address). In addition under US law, police can compel presentation of fingerprints, but passwords are protected under the 5th amendment.

ooternesson Let's talk space toilets

Is it simpler to build a better space toilet, or to build a ship with centrifugal gravity and use a regular toilet?

ooternesson People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

Too little, too late. I switched to Linux and I'm never looking back. Good riddance, Microsoft.

ooternesson Super Bowl Ad for Ring Cameras Touted AI Surveillance Network

So you gave up everyone's privacy for no benefit at all?

ooternesson Nepal's Mountainside Teahouses Elevate the Experience for Trekkers

It took me a minute to realize that "Trekkers" in this headline is not referring to fans of Star Trek.

ooternesson The truth behind the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference

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

1. Do you know anybody from "J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference"?

2. Have you ever been to "J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference"?

3. Do you know anybody who has ever been to "J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference"?

ooternesson Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

Sounds like a great plugin.

ooternesson 'If you aren't lying, you aren't flying.' Pilots hide mental health struggles

No, it really hasn't. Sweeping the problem under the rug has already resulted in at least 150 deaths, which could have been prevented by allowing pilots to seek mental health care.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525