Hacker News Reader

smcinon German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews

Shocking, only 10 short years since this (when Merkel was Chancellor): Turkey asks Germany to prosecute comedian Jan Böhmermann (Germany's equivalent of John Stewart) over Erdoğan poem

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11474967

smcinon 7.8 magnitude earthquake shakes part of southern Philippines. Tsunami possible

The most reliable up-to-date source is typically Phivolcs, but currently their website is overloaded, so X/Twitter:

https://www.phivolcs.dost.gov.ph/earthquake-information/

https://x.com/phivolcs_dost?lang=en

> PHIVOLCS-DOST @phivolcs_dost

#EarthquakePH #EarthquakeSarangani #iFelt_SaranganiEarthquake

Earthquake Information No.2

Date and Time: 08 June 2026 - 07:37 AM Magnitude = 7.8 Depth = 033 km Location = 05.57°N, 124.98°E - 032 km S 04° W of Maasim (Sarangani)

http://x.com/phivolcs_dost/status/2063780683978535398 https://x.com/phivolcs_dost/status/2063780683978535398/photo...

smcinon U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse

The Doolittle Raiders actually flew B-25Bs 2600 miles, they didn't hitch a ride on a Japanese cargo ship, though. Spiderweb maybe more resembles the 2024 Lebanon pager attack than the Doolittle Raid.

Sure it was a huge shock to Russia but clearly was a once-off, and required undercover Ukrainian operatives to assemble the smuggled drone parts near the Ukrainian or Kazakh borders, and Russian truckers to unwittingly move containers. All of that operation was revealed and probably can not be repeated; the operatives were evacuated.

> It put the Russians on notice that they weren't safe. Not that the Russians care, but most countries would.

Well there was no GSM jamming near sensitive Russian sites but there is now, and that seems to be annoying Russian civilians intensely, along with internet blocking.

smcinon Meta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked by abusing its AI chatbot

"Really?"

smcinon World Cup isn't 104 Taylor Swift concerts

Remember in 2017 when 'Hamilton' was the hot thing, and companies emerged with dubious business models about industrial-scale scalping and reselling tickets? This is why we have (/used to have) regulators.

Also, 9/2025 Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast with Lina Khan and Zohran Mamdani to discuss how dynamic pricing and algorithmic ticket monopolies are pricing everyday fans out of experiencing "the people's game" in person: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4dJsLDvwrU

smcinon The Crazy Tech Used in This Years World Cup [video]

"association football" aka soccer aka football

smcinon Best AI web scraper tools I've tested in 2026 (free and paid)

You have to declare your affiliation with Spidra in your posts (are you an affiliate? marketing? employee?), to follow HN guidelines, and be neutral with criticisms. Otherwise your threads are getting killed.

If you did that, your content looks decent to me.

smcinon U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse

If you mean Operation Spiderweb, the Ukrainian Osa drone only had a range of 5 miles/ 8km (one-way) and had to be launched from the roof of containers simultaneously transported unknowingly by Russian truckers and that was a covert operation that took 18 months to set up. So no that particular model couldn't attack even 10 miles away.

Ukraine has other long-range strike drones but haven't heard of more than a thousand miles range.

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

https://sofrep.com/news/deepstrike-campaign-drone-attacks-ag...

smcinon Having your insulin pump die while you're on vacation

You don't understand the context: the issue was not that the pharmacy software somehow innocently can't (automatically) find a pharmacy farther than 25 miles away from the current location. It was specifically CVS prevented this since 2023 arising from their opioid settlement, to prevent "pharmacy-shopping", and to comply with with "Good faith dispensing" legal requirement under the federal Controlled Substances Act (insulin is a non-controlled prescription medication but the PBMs and pharmacies seem to widely apply these restrictions on search (and prescription transfer), which seems silly). Here's [0] one 2024 article (from RI, but whatever) listing all the new controls they imposed on pharmacists and doctors (among other things, transferring prescriptions across state boundaries triggers alarms). As you read this insanity, remember that the Purdue Pharma execs convicted didn't go to prison [1], at most got 400 hours of community service + fines. The Sackler family were still sponsoring the NY Metropolitan until 2019, and none of them were even criminally charged. Anyway, there's your root-cause. It should not affect insulin or other things but clearly the knock-on effect is it does.

[0]: https://www.risehealth.org/insights-articles/article/justice...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purdue_Pharma

smcinon Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game

"him wot worked on" is just British English slang for "the guy who worked on"

smcinon The worst job interview I ever had

If you got to that point it's just a formality, and unless you somehow blow it the job is (probably) already yours, if you decide you still want it. You seem to have jumped to unwarranted assumptions about the company culture; quite possibly the CEO does want to make sure the culture is good and remains good. It's not necessarily a binary test of whether the CEO can't trust delegating to their managers; it's also your constructive opportunity to use that conversation to get more insight into where the company, strategy, product/service, customers etc. are going. A good question to ask the CEO is about the broader impact of your role: that should get you some useful insight, also you compare the delta between what the CEO says vs what the senior managers said vs what the recruiter said; they don't need to be identical but they should broadly agree, and it shouldn't reveal any fundamental disagreements or ambiguities (e.g. "your role is incremental support of product X" vs "totally rewrite it in language Y in the next 9 months"). Listening to their response should also give you subtle behavioral cues about who in the company does/doesn't have influence, credibility and where the pain points are: you can't generally get that from the previous interviews, and it can be a faux pas to explicitly ask.

(PS: if you find reasons to suspect the CEO isn't delegating effectively to managers, then ask the CEO an open-ended question "How much do you do yourself vs which tasks do you delegate to your managers?" then listen carefully to their answer. And it's still not necessarily a red flag, it may just be a new or inexperienced CEO, or maybe overcompensating for one or two bad hire experiences at current or previous company. Compare to their answer to "How do you assess new hires within the first 90 days?").

The only (minor) negative I'd take from this is that it still behaves like a small startup scaling quickly, and they haven't yet figured out how to to scale interviewing and hiring for when they get larger... but that's overall a good complaint, it shows they're still growing. It's much better that your signoff interview is with the CXO (or VP) than the Director of HR, or an AI bot. Honestly I'd pay more attention to how many days/weeks/months it takes them to make the hiring decision than how many management layers were involved; that's a bigger tell of organizational dysfunction.

Don't overthink.

smcinon Ordinary WiFi can now identify people with near perfect accuracy

No, Austria doesn't forbid using (or even having installed) a video camera in your car, in itself.

But they do forbid RECORDING and PUBLISHING (e.g. on social media) videos where a SPECIFIC car (identifiable by the license plates) is visible, or SPECIFIC people (must fuzz them, and maybe edit out voices). Per their DPA's interpretation of data privacy; not the police. The best writeup I found is by Amazing_Bluebird_ at [0a].

(I see some conflicting reports where the Austrian *data protection authority (not the police) gave people civil fines (not tickets) just for having a camera. Sounds like those can be overturned by appealing.

I wonder how Austrian Teslas handle all this. Apparently Tesla Sentry Mode ("Guardian Mode") in public spaces in Austria is heavily restricted and generally considered illegal under GDPR.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Austria/comments/1l3a2gj/sind_dashc...

[0a]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Austria/comments/1l3a2gj/comment/mv...

[1]chttps://www.reddit.com/r/bih/comments/1l2yi9r/dashcam_u_aust...

smcinon Standard WiFi can identify individuals with near-perfect accuracy

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48249399

smcinon Cheney on the MTA (1994)

(From headline, I seriously thought this was a photo of the former US Defense Secretary/VP riding on public transit back in the day).

smcinon Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers

How long is your expectation that you can access that e-book, after you pay $10?

smcinon Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers

This isn't about hardware "lasting", it's about basic software functionality on older hardware intentionally being disabled. Somewhat similar to Apple's Batterygate.

smcinon Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

Moreover, under Silver's deal with Disney for 2013-8 he "retained ownership of his proprietary models.... Disney owned the brand, the IP, and the archive" [0]. Then apparently in 2018 that arrangement expired and Silver decided to leave. Now in 2026 Disney deleted the archive without announcement.

So it sounds messy, but I don't understand Silver's complaint: what did he lose now in 2026, if he had 5 years to back things up starting in 2013? Is he complaining that he lost legal rights to use his IP? or never retained a license to his IP? surely not that Disney physically deleted the archive, 8-13 years later in 2026, why would that even affect him? NYT still has archives of his work from 2010-3. (or was it the SEO effect of the backlinks from the 2013-8 archive?)

Also, he had a choice whether to sell to sports website The Athletic or Disney (The Atlantic was a third interested party but didn't bid). In [0] he says:

> We came quite close to securing a deal with The Athletic... the potential deal with The Athletic hit a last-minute snafu, which there might have been time to work around if there hadn’t been a hard deadline imposed by Disney, but Disney needed a decision from us.

(Well who's responsible for that negotiation, if not him? Anyway how do we know The Athletic deal wouldn't have gone south eventually too, after a decade?)

In any case it's quite possible that with media consolidation, the archives of his models (for 2014, 2016, 2018 elections) would or will go away eventually. In which case, what's the lesson learned about licensing or retaining non-exclusive rights to his own past work? I only see his complaint, no lesson-learned about what he should have done. And even if he sold/relinquished all rights to it back in 2018, I don't see why he couldn't have had someone else clean-code and replicate that work. (Like the days of x86 licenses, or other blackbox reverse-engineering.)

(I try to avoid the term "virtue signaling" on HN regardless when it is/isn't merited, it seems to raise the temperature of the resulting discussion and move it away from the facts, it tends to get read as an ad-hominem).

[0]: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/articles/nate-silver-rev...

smcinon Scammers are abusing an internal Microsoft account to send spam links

In the US Caller ID has been so hopelessly compromised (for almost two decades now, that's on Congress) that financial institutions almost never make outbound calls, and only ever use standardized published numbers; I wasn't aware other countries differ so much.

Please tell us more context with regard to your UK banks making multiple unannounced calls demanding your ID ... were you an individual customer? finance director? MD? or what? Why on earth do they do that? Have you told them in writing not to? There must be more backstory to that.

smcinon Air France and Airbus found guilty of manslaughter over 2009 plane crash

But it wasn't at all just about Bonin: Robert and Bonin repeatedly kept trying to override each other; Robert was giving Bonin some information with which he could have figured out he was stalling (although Robert was also trying to climb); and Dubois had gone to deal with his sleep deprivation without designating either of them as PIC, and when Dubois finally returned (2:11:40, sounds still sleep-deprived based on his confusion) he didn't recognize the obvious stall or take control until they had lost almost all of their altitude.

It makes Air France look worse that all three pilots didn't react properly (or weren't trained or experienced), than just faulting Bonin. And at least two of them were sleep-deprived. But there were multiple systemic failures, not just the pilots.

smcinon Scammers are abusing an internal Microsoft account to send spam links

Ask them their name/ last initial, employee ID or unique identifier for the conversation, direct phone number, job title and what location they're based at. Scammers will pretty much always refuse/argue/hang up on this (once I had one start insulting my mother in Hindi when I asked him this). Then call your bank's proper number and verify all of these details.

(But in any case your bank will never call outwards to you, unless you've specifically requested that, which you almost never do.)

smcinon Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

What are your criteria for recognizing a useful insightful blog into a poster's previous business ventures?

Few tellers are neutral and objective, many writers get accused of selectively editing things: Philip Greenspun's account of the demise of Ars Digita springs to mind. Or Jerry Kaplan on Go (mobile startup). Or Joel Spolsky on the last decade of StackOverflow.

smcinon Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

Stop being abusive. Your original double-negative comment lacks clarity, it can be read in two completely opposite senses. It would better for you simply to have clarified it (and next time be clearer in the first place). People here brought that to your attention but all you do is attack them. That's on you not us. If your stylistic choices make your writing incomprehensible, then don't use them. That's all.

Put it like this: it was an interesting discussion before that, and looks like people expected you would simply clarify your meaning (like most of us do when we're being unclear), so the discussion could proceed. Not go on all-out attack.

smcinon Lost at sea: the man who vanished for 14 months (2015)

That's a ripping yarn. Or a cautionary tale of what can happen if you don't bring an anchor.

Previous mentions:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/106wp...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7368458

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35683102

smcinon Hindenburg’s Smoking Room

Jim Simons, mathematician and hedge fund manager (1938–2024) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons

smcinon Hindenburg’s Smoking Room

They mean comparatively noone takes long-distance (Amtrak), other than in the northeast, or at least east of KS/TX/OK. They're not talking about commuter rail, obviously lots of people take that.

But if you wanted to travel LA-NY by train that's 67-82hrs with a transfer in Chicago. Compared to 5.5hrs by plane (+ time getting to/from airport and boarding).

smcinon Two EA-18 fighter jets collide at Mountain Home airshow, pilots ejected safely

What's your source for claiming "[the US] uses like 50% more healthcare services than a typical single-payer society"?

Personal take-home pay for physicians is 8-10% of total US healthcare spending ($5tr). (or 20%/$1.11t for "physician and clinical services" overall which includes doctors, clinical staff, admin, and overhead costs.)

US total spending on pharmaceuticals is $1 tr; net spending on outpatient prescription drugs is $600b.

The DoD's total spending is $961.6b for FY 2026.

There's little argument against reforming both military spending and healthcare spending in the US, but (as Scott Galloway says) it's awfully hard to find a prominent politician who vocally supports reforming both these (not one at the expense of the other). So, the out-of-control spending/borrowing will continue.

Anyway, as to this crash, all other considerations apart, E/A-18Gs (electronic warfare planes) cost 60% more than F-18s. Who authorized flying them in an airshow?

smcinon How a self-proclaimed Swiss king's 'empire' is riling local authorities

'A full-time job': How a self-proclaimed Swiss king's 'empire' is riling local authorities

https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20260510-how-switzerland-...

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

smcinon I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

IEEE SWEBOK tried to and is generally considered not to have achieved what it set out to do:

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41907412

See if you can find anyone outside of PE relying on it. ACM withdrew from it in 2000.

smcinon I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

> It's looking in apallment at...

"looking on appalled at..."

smcinon Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

Not really. The comment of yours that started the lack of clarity is this double-negative, and 0/2 of us who responded to you here found it useful:

> Most graduates aren't really qualified to work anywhere that they couldn't have worked before going to college in the first place.

The double-negative could be read both ways: "Most HS grads aren't really qualified to work anywhere and college doesn't add much" or "a [HS] education is already adequate qualification for many jobs; college doesn't add much". So we apply Occam's razor and since the [U-5] unemployment rate for [US] HS grads is << 50%, conclude you meant the former. But the comment was still needlessly obfuscation. Even if we assume which country and education system you were talking about.

Conversely, it's a little weird how I ignored your lack of clarity and didn't point it out so starkly, then you reduce the interaction to this ping-pong. I don't intend to overflow the stack on this.