Recent submissions

Comment · 4 hours ago
Lol the vast majority of pirates are not paying for anything. Maybe a very wealthy and ethical person is fine paying for something after they've sampled the pirated version but a good chunk of the world never had the money to afford buying it in the first place. There's plenty of ways to sample media nowadays that doesn't involve piracy, there's infinite review channels on YouTube and you can often listen to new albums for the price of watching ads. Sure, I'm sure there are many pirates willing to see a movie in theaters or attend a concert because those are experiences you can't get at home. But for something like a PC game or application, the paying customer and pirate have an identical experience (excluding online multiplayer, that often doesn't work for pirated games).
Comment · 4 hours ago
More data can support changing performance limits. They also may have been more conservative in the past when the rover was new because they wanted to ensure it met its mission requirements. Since the rover has long past its original mission duration (1 year, it's been 5), they can relax a bit more and take bigger risks to achieve bigger goals.
Comment · 5 hours ago
Ingenuity does have an RT ProASIC3 (an older rad hard FPGA) on board so presumably that could be what's handling the voting. Since the Snapdragon was originally used for navigation and operates much, they could be voting at a higher level rather than actual CPU output. When it was still a helicopter, the various sensors and actuators all connect to the FPGA so the voting could be based on commands to the actuators (turn left, reduce power, etc.)
Comment · 1 day ago
New York's favorite thing to do is vote in the worst people and then complain nonstop.
Comment · 2 days ago
I like how the Special Agent's affidavit just looks like his wife caught him sports betting and he figured out a way to make it look like he was really investigating a crime.
Comment · 2 days ago
Printers definitely do wear out. We had a very nice Canon for 10 years and slowly got out of alignment. There's a method to realign the print heads but it got to the point where it was beyond the adjustment limits. You could see the offset between the black and color inks in plain text. An interesting effect but not so much when you're trying to make something look good. Additionally, it would jam more often. The paper dust accumulation in the mechanisms seemed to be what was causing that. Everything went downhill as we were doing a lot of printing for our wedding and it was unfixable by the time we were done. It was a good printer, it deserved its place in Printer Valhalla.

Now we have a Brother that is also very nice but lacks the photo printing quality that the Canon had. We so rarely print photos anyway that it's just easier to send an order to CVS or Walgreens to have them do it.

Comment · 2 days ago
For some of those devices, they use very bespoke CPUs that are simply not documented publicly.
Comment · 2 days ago
It's incredible how effective those messages are for some people. Some victims emptied their bank accounts because they were so ashamed of whatever porn they were watching and possibly afraid of legal consequences too. The amount of accounts on X that purportedly sell CSAM though telegram channels seems like an incredible opportunity for scammers beyond just normal fraud. Steal the money from the buyer first and then turn around and blackmail them for more.
Comment · 2 days ago
That's probably why the number of new questions asked dropped off. Once someone has asked "how to fizzbuzz in python", that's pretty much it. You'll get the textbook answer, the "why are you fizzbuzzing in the first place" answers, and then an answer a couple years later using the new python fizzbuzz built in library. You have a massive compendium of questions and answers and for most people, that's good enough. I don't think that stack overflow was necessarily less popular in visitors pre-LLMs but they certainly killed it off quick.
Comment · 2 days ago
"hey there goes that guy with no plates again"
Comment · 2 days ago
It's race in all but name. They actually get around it by specifying everything about a person other than race, like skin color, accent or language skills.

If they need a Viet person for a role in a Vietnam War movie, they'll cast for "native or fluent Vietnamese speakers". Of course it's entirely plausible that a black guy is a fluent Vietnamese speaker but auditions are very subjective so good luck proving that the black guy played the role of NVA Soldier #1 better than the actual Vietnamese guy.

Comment · 3 days ago
There is a thing called Bona Fide Occupational Qualifications where an employer could discriminate against protected classes because the job description is so specific. Like if a church wanted to hire a new pastor, the job description requires the applicant to be Christian and likely a specific denomination, and any non-christian would be disqualified from the position. BFOQs must be spelled out in the job description to make it absolutely clear that the qualifications are necessary for the job. Also age, sex, and gender can be BFOQs like if the job description is for an acting role of a specific character. Race could potentially apply to something like an acting job too but that's a lot more of a dicey subject, like it would need to be absolutely critical to the production that a character is a specific race.
Comment · 3 days ago
And for me, I'd rather do my own assembly than pay $1400 for five boards from Circuithub that I can get from JLCPCB for $20 or OSHPark for $50.
Comment · 4 days ago
I see a lot of police bodycam videos on YouTube of cops stopping drug traffickers for bullshit reasons (5 over speed limit on highway, crossing the line, following too closely) and it's usually a state or county cop that's on a federal task force or they'll have a "civilian ride along" in the car that gets way more involved than any civilian would ever be. They aren't actually an employee of the FBI but they have credentials from the FBI due to their task force job, it gives them access to FBI databases and bulletins while they still maintain their normal police job.

It's really bizarre to watch those videos because they are very routine. They stop the person for marginal lawbreaking, ask them to step out and sit in the front of their cruiser, then the traffic violations turn into warnings, cop makes basic small talk while writing warning and pretty much ignores everything suspect says, cop asks about any contraband in the car and asks to search, suspect usually (stupidly) agrees to search, cops pretty much instantly find the drugs. And if the suspect says no to the search, the K9 unit is already pulling up behind them because they were called before the cop ever turned on their lights and siren.

It's incredibly obvious these are pretextual stops. There is definitely a national program tracking license plates because there's no reasonable explanation for cops getting this lucky on pulling over random people that are driving completely unremarkable.

I'm pretty sure that's how they caught that megachurch pastor smuggling drugs for the cartel, they look for travel patterns for license plates and especially look at rental car registrations. You can't pull over every car but you can definitely look for cars making repeated trips, especially those that are made to known trafficking cities.

I had a friend from highschool that got pretty involved with his mom with drug trafficking. They caught him at some Indian reservation that overlaps upstate NY and Canada. The arrest affidavit states the cops saw a car parked for a couple hours at a casino and then followed the car to the border of the Indian reservation. Then they waited for the car to leave and then pulled him over for crossing a line. Of course they found significant ketamine in the car. The cops already knew who they were looking for because a car parked at a casino for a couple hours is not suspicious and definitely not suspicious enough to follow.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton