Hacker News: bbatsell

Flock used >100 times to track veteran who recorded traffic stop

bbatsell — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 16:48:13 +0000

Article URL: https://reason.com/2026/09/02/wisconsin-cops-used-flock-over-100-times-to-track-a-navy-veteran-after-he-lawfully-recorded-a-traffic-stop/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49578310

Points: 380

# Comments: 209

New comment by bbatsell in "hdiutil is deprecated in macOS 27 Golden Gate"

bbatsell — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 19:41:25 +0000

Agreed. seatbelt/sandbox-exec has been “deprecated” for many, many years yet it still underlies all of the system’s sandboxing and Claude et al. use it for their own sandboxes. (And so do I — writing seatbelt rules is the only chance I get to write lisp-flavored anything these days.)

New comment by bbatsell in "RFK Jr tells US families to vaccinate children against measles amid outbreak"

bbatsell — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 02:09:35 +0000

I encourage anyone interested to read the actual facts about this incident, which differ significantly from the above recitation.

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

New comment by bbatsell in "Some AI Systems Differentially Downplay Their Creators' Controversies"

bbatsell — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 02:20:40 +0000

Correct link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7059338

New comment by bbatsell in "IMAX CEO: We haven't made new IMAX projectors in 50 years"

bbatsell — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 14:28:10 +0000

While that’s true, IMAX also doesn’t make its digital projectors. They buy off-the-shelf Barcos and then integrate them into a larger system.

New comment by bbatsell in "Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs"

bbatsell — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 17:38:52 +0000

AppleCare+ annual is perpetual as long as you keep paying it (and Apple offers to switch to that when your 3-year lump sum expires if you choose that instead). I’m guessing it ends whenever they officially discontinue hardware support, which has traditionally been about 7 years after the last unit is produced, but I haven’t reached that yet to know for sure.

New comment by bbatsell in "Ask HN: Favorite Non-Spammy iPhone Games?"

bbatsell — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 23:38:40 +0000

Sumaddle is a wonderful puzzle/logic game.

New comment by bbatsell in "Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge"

bbatsell — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 02:19:43 +0000

This headline unfortunately offers more smoke than light. This article has nothing to do with the current tête-à-tête with the Pentagon. It is discussing one specific change to Anthropic's "Responsible Scaling Policy" that the company publicly released today as version "3.0".

New comment by bbatsell in "Video filmed by ICE agent who shot Minneapolis woman emerges"

bbatsell — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 22:53:14 +0000

The president can only pardon crimes against the United States. Even if removed to federal court, state charges remain state charges and the judge & jury must follow state laws. Only the venue changes, with the intent being that the federal judge will potentially serve as a more neutral arbiter.

New comment by bbatsell in "Vessel searching for MH370 moving at low speed in a specific area"

bbatsell — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 21:17:43 +0000

No, because there is no information to report at present. This site contains a live map of the hourly position reporting from the OI vessel:

https://www.mh370-caption.net/index.php/armada-tracking/

New comment by bbatsell in "Video filmed by ICE agent who shot Minneapolis woman emerges"

bbatsell — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 21:10:35 +0000

Absolutely fascinating that this report is very detailed about _certain_ things... but edits the source video to fade out right at the relevant instant and then completely omits the fact that the agent called her a "fucking bitch" immediately after executing her. (The released source material is several seconds longer.)

Edit at 21:29 UTC: BBC has edited the article to include the following line: "In the final part of the video the car is seen veering down the road. The ICE agent swears." Again, that "final part" has been edited out entirely. It shows that the agent was not affected by the SUV, and maintains his iPhone in his offhand recording the incident without issue. "The ICE agent swears." is used euphemistically to obfuscate what he actually did and said, which was to angrily call the victim a "fucking bitch".

New comment by bbatsell in "Vessel searching for MH370 moving at low speed in a specific area"

bbatsell — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 21:01:11 +0000

This article is 4 days old and Ocean Infinity has already given details — technical problems with one AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) and poor weather and wave conditions. There will be many such changes in location and speed during this mission, including when deploying and retrieving each of the 3 AUVs.

New comment by bbatsell in "Clarification: Regarding the Performance of IQuest-Coder-V1"

bbatsell — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 18:15:59 +0000

Anchor to new information (HN strips it from the URL): https://github.com/IQuestLab/IQuest-Coder-V1/issues/14#issue...

Context: Earlier this week a new model was released and researchers discovered that during training it had "cheated" on SWEBench by issuing git commands to find information it should have been blinded to.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46472667

Clarification: Regarding the Performance of IQuest-Coder-V1

bbatsell — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 18:13:07 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/IQuestLab/IQuest-Coder-V1/issues/14

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46490564

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by bbatsell in "Ron Conway skewers Marc Benioff in board resignation after 25 years"

bbatsell — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 19:04:37 +0000

There are multiple statutory routes to activate the NG, and nearly every time Trump has done so, it has been through a “federalized” route. Even red-state governors have requested this because it transfers the financial and legal obligations to the federal government. NG units activated by the governor must be paid, housed, transported, defended in court, etc by the state.

The catch is that the routes, as of yet, purport to impose operational restrictions on the federalized units. The administration isn’t exactly strictly following them, but they still exist and district judges are attempting to enforce them. The administration is hard at work developing a “colorable” basis to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to remove nearly all such restrictions.

New comment by bbatsell in "Ask HN: Can you uninstall Notion from macOS?"

bbatsell — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 23:33:55 +0000

One technique I occasionally use is to look at the “zap” stanza of an app’s homebrew cask formula:

https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask/blob/f44500902e420...

Based on the “notion-updater” I’m guessing there’s also a launchagent/launchdaemon that is “updating” (read: reinstalling) it whenever you manually delete it.

New comment by bbatsell in "Gov workers say their shutdown out-of-office replies were forcibly changed"

bbatsell — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 20:23:24 +0000

Budget resolutions for quite some time have used the reconciliation process, which only requires a simple majority (but imposes some restrictions). The problem is that they shoved through the “OBBBA” using the process intended for the budget, and now it’s no longer available. You can only use the process once per year per subject (spending, revenue, debt limit), and the OBBBA used up all three.

New comment by bbatsell in "Ring reintroduces video sharing with police"

bbatsell — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 21:57:38 +0000

> I think a bigger issue is that AI is being used to censor footage from the owners of the camera themselves. There's been stories about gunshots being censored from the owners of the camera by Ring.

Can you provide sources for this? I just spent a few minutes looking and couldn't find anything, but I'd be super interested in learning more about it.

New comment by bbatsell in "Websites hosting major US climate reports taken down"

bbatsell — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 15:41:54 +0000

I agree that it's not the usual response, but given Musk's strong promotion of natalism and the fact that he has used IVF to select XY embryos for _all_ of his offspring...

New comment by bbatsell in "Lufthansa plane flown by autopilot after pilot faints in cockpit"

bbatsell — Sat, 17 May 2025 22:07:36 +0000

It doesn't really solve the underlying issue. On long-duration flights, pilots have to rotate who is in the cockpit and who is in crew rest. They receive food and beverage service from flight attendants entering the cockpit. On very rare occasions, they are asked to enter the cabin and examine some part of the plane to determine if something is an emergency or not. Mantraps are perhaps a future requirement for cleansheet designs, but even that seems unlikely to me.