Hacker News: mb5

New comment by mb5 in "AI companies spend record sums on Washington lobbying"

mb5 — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:43:20 +0000

Plenty of nice round numbers in this indictment: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/file/450211/dl?inline

Search for “Wire transfer of” to jump to them.

Plus a couple of $1,666,667 which stand out in contrast to all the zeroes.

New comment by mb5 in "Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables"

mb5 — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:47:32 +0000

They’re referring to the source of wood pellets for the Drax power plant i.e. this https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/26/drax-pow...

New comment by mb5 in "Python’s new t-strings"

mb5 — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 13:09:26 +0000

They sure do, e.g. https://docs.astral.sh/ruff/rules/pandas-use-of-dot-is-null/

New comment by mb5 in "All clocks are 30 seconds late"

mb5 — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 11:39:15 +0000

Jonathan Agnew has a similar story about the late, great Australian cricket commentator Richie Benaud, although filling ~52 seconds rather than 5 minutes.

https://youtu.be/FsmtFZQJbHU

New comment by mb5 in "You've got to hide your myopia away: John Lennon's contact lenses"

mb5 — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 05:53:37 +0000

They do align themselves but, for me at least, it can take a little while. Aiming the mark downwards really speeds things up.

New comment by mb5 in "lsix: Like "ls", but for images"

mb5 — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 19:06:58 +0000

Nice breakdown.

I think jasper is this, a library for JPEG-2000 images: https://www.ece.uvic.ca/~frodo/jasper/

Linked to from here: https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/jasper

New comment by mb5 in "Koheesio: Nike's Python-based framework to build advanced data-pipelines"

mb5 — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 07:17:59 +0000

Why do you think the poster is connected with the repo? I couldn’t see any link.

Follow-Up to Adolescence After Early Peanut Introduction for Allergy Prevention

mb5 — Tue, 28 May 2024 16:29:06 +0000

Article URL: https://evidence.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/EVIDoa2300311

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40502515

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by mb5 in "Financial Statement Analysis with Large Language Models"

mb5 — Sat, 25 May 2024 06:59:17 +0000

CFD trading apps have this in the UK (and possibly EU, but I can’t see whether ESMA kept the rule):

“78% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider.”

https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-confirms-perm...

Of course, there are a lot more ways to lose money than CFDs.

New comment by mb5 in "Hackers threatening to publish a stolen sanctions and financial crimes watchlist"

mb5 — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 18:42:51 +0000

This is where the article is insufficiently clear. Lists of people who are under investigation for fraud is definitely something banks keep quiet, for the reason you mentioned. But as a sibling comment says, sanctions lists are public, as are records of people convicted of relevant crimes in most (all?) jusrisdictions. So what kind of lists are these? Because the article's line about "individuals who were sanctioned as recently as this year" is hardly exciting - the UK sanctions list has people sanctioned today, 18 April.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-uk-sanctions-...

New comment by mb5 in "Why it's taking so long for Americans to get payments instantly"

mb5 — Sun, 17 Dec 2023 07:27:49 +0000

It isn’t, but I don’t think the parent comment is trying to use it like that - they’re going for “how many banks are needed to support an economy”. Otherwise deposits per bank or perhaps assets (loans etc) per bank would be much better choices.

New comment by mb5 in "Met Police Scans Almost 250k Faces Using Facial Recognition Technology in 2023"

mb5 — Sat, 11 Nov 2023 10:52:46 +0000

> the Met’s director of intelligence Lindsey Chiswick said that if there is not a match the image is not only immediately deleted, but is also pixelated

Which is it?

New comment by mb5 in "Recursive Recipes"

mb5 — Sun, 15 Oct 2023 11:28:26 +0000

Yes - and the 1/8 of a cow is needed to make milk to make butter. This might be possible if you were very selective about which eighth of a cow you procured, but you’d need some additional kit which the recipe doesn’t account for.

New comment by mb5 in "Apple’s failure to build a key part for its new iPhones"

mb5 — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 17:25:34 +0000

If you pull down to open Control Centre and then long-press on the WiFi button, you can toggle the hotspot off and on without having to deal with the Settings app. Not sure if you’re having the same problem but that works well for me.

New comment by mb5 in "How to Stare at Your Phone Without Losing Your Soul"

mb5 — Tue, 30 May 2023 11:21:21 +0000

I've found Work and Personal focus modes on iPhone very helpful for cutting down on two of my mindless habits: checking [social media app] during work hours, and [work IM client] at evenings and weekends. The modes are scheduled to automatically kick in at the right time, and so far, so good.

It's a pretty simple setup: one set of home screens for each mode, silencing non-work notifications during Work focus, and snoozing work email during Personal focus. Although writing this, I realise I ought to look at blocking Reddit and HN websites...

Encoding Cryptic Crossword Clues with TEI

mb5 — Sun, 28 May 2023 11:56:30 +0000

Article URL: https://journals.openedition.org/jtei/2222

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36103249

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by mb5 in "Modern work requires attention – constant alerts steal it"

mb5 — Tue, 23 May 2023 04:37:16 +0000

Subject Matter Experts

New comment by mb5 in "Tidyverse 2.0.0"

mb5 — Sun, 09 Apr 2023 15:35:03 +0000

Can’t say I’ve used it, but isn’t that what dtplyr is supposed to provide?

https://dtplyr.tidyverse.org/

New comment by mb5 in "A looming copper crunch and why recycling can’t fix it"

mb5 — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 07:22:32 +0000

It's not just stigma with thalidomide - the two forms of the molecule interconvert in the body. So even a dose of 100% pure R-thalidomide (the useful kind) will invert into its mirror image, L-thalidomide (the harmful kind), and will approach a 50:50 mix. As the sibling comment says, it's still used in cases where there's little to no chance of pregnancy, because we don't know another way to make it safe.