Hacker News: sjy

New comment by sjy in "Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly"

sjy — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 01:01:10 +0000

No counterparts worldwide? Here in Australia, all significant case law has been published on AustLII, which is freely accessible and searchable, since about 2000. I think CanLII and NZLII are equally comprehensive. Government law publishers provide free and authoritative access to all statutes. Lexis and Westlaw still make money by publishing commentary and summaries, but paywalled primary sources are an American problem.

New comment by sjy in "Chat Control proposal fails again after public opposition"

sjy — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 13:15:13 +0000

“Chat Control” is a pejorative name used by the law’s opponents. Its official name is the Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse.

New comment by sjy in "Scammed out of $130K via fake Google call, spoofed Google email and auth sync"

sjy — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 02:05:58 +0000

I'd complain to Google about this, maybe through a lawyer if needed to get them to take it seriously. They won't accept full responsibility, and in general people need to be aware of the risk of spoofed email, but Google should be able to stop fake emails from google.com from appearing in a Gmail inbox. You'd think they would also have the ability to recover an email deleted immediately after an account takeover, or at least work out how the spoofed email was delivered from other internal logs. Google should investigate whether their negligence contributed to the success of this attack.

New comment by sjy in "How the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg Got Added to the White House Signal Chat"

sjy — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 10:15:09 +0000

The article says an email including Goldberg’s signature block was copied and pasted into a text message from Hughes.

New comment by sjy in "Working Title (Insurance)"

sjy — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 12:02:20 +0000

That's partly because the dominant platform for electronic conveyancing, PEXA, has a monopoly. Only licensed professionals who pay subscription fees can access PEXA. This removes competitive pressure on conveyancing fees because self-represented buyers must use a slower, riskier, non-standard paper process.

https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/nsw-product...

https://www.productivity.nsw.gov.au/market-study-on-econveya...

New comment by sjy in "Legal models hallucinate in 1 out of 6 (or more) benchmarking queries"

sjy — Sat, 01 Jun 2024 16:10:47 +0000

I’d say a small law firm. They don’t have a security team, they’re routinely targeted by phishers, and their data is easier to convert into money than the huge mass of (mostly completely uninteresting) data fed into ChatGPT.

New comment by sjy in "Wireproxy: WireGuard client that exposes itself as a HTTP/SOCKS5 proxy"

sjy — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 06:25:21 +0000

That's fine if you control the endpoint and want to expose ssh on it, but WireGuard endpoints are also commonly available from VPN providers who don't provide shell access.

New comment by sjy in "WhatsApp forces Pegasus spyware maker to share its secret code"

sjy — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 10:52:06 +0000

That generally doesn’t happen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_criminality

New comment by sjy in "Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?"

sjy — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 06:59:12 +0000

> that is insane that the average american lives in a home that they own by the time they're 35. That is so far and wide not the case here in Australia.

The stats seem pretty similar here – 50% of 30-34 year olds owned their own home in 2021: https://www.housingdata.gov.au/visualisation/home-ownership/...

New comment by sjy in "Australia to ban engineered stone"

sjy — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 09:31:51 +0000

This is addressed in the linked source, although that wouldn’t be obvious if you’re not familiar with Australian work health and safety law:

> the re-emergence of silicosis in engineered stone workers is also due to a failure of compliance with existing WHS laws … PCBUs [persons conducting a business or undertaking, who are subject to WHS laws] have not done all that is reasonably practicable to eliminate or minimise those risks, and workers have not taken reasonable care for their own health and safety and that of others [which is a criminal offence]. Finally, there has been insufficient compliance and enforcement actions by WHS regulators to drive behaviour change in the sector … A lower silica content engineered stone is not expected to result in improvements in compliance. The features of the sector that have contributed to the current levels of non-compliance remain – the sector is comprised of mostly small businesses with few barriers to entry and a lower understanding of WHS obligations.

New comment by sjy in "The presumption that computers are working correctly"

sjy — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 12:07:11 +0000

> So, does the defense get to subpoena the logs, and depose a programmer to explain why some random request returned a 502?

In theory yes, but you can get some idea of how it worked in practice from the transcript of the trial of Seema Misra [1]. This was one of the few cases where the postmaster pleaded not guilty and expert evidence was presented to the jury. The defence complained throughout the trial that their expert did not have adequate access to the underlying computer records. New documents were identified during the course of the trial, and the defence applied unsuccessfully for the trial to be stayed at the close of the prosecution case.

[1]: https://journals.sas.ac.uk/deeslr/article/view/2217/2151

New comment by sjy in "CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification"

sjy — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 00:55:30 +0000

The US Code is divided into numbered titles, sections, paragraphs and subparagraphs which can link to and incorporate each other by reference. This tree structure is reflected in typographic conventions which visually distinguish operative provisions from headings, indices and editorial notes. Isn't this the same kind of "structured format" as a code repository made up of libraries, modules, source files and functions?

New comment by sjy in "Power companies fight Maine’s proposed non-profit utility"

sjy — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 23:04:14 +0000

Goodwill refers to the part of the price that is based on "looking at the current annual income and projecting growth over a few years." It's the value over and above what you would get if you emptied the company bank accounts and sold all its other property in a fire sale. It's a perfectly sensible concept, even if the process of quantifying it by coming up with a price "based on" current income and anticipated growth (or other advantages like eliminating competition) is contestable.

New comment by sjy in "School district sues Meta, Google, and TikTok over ‘mental health crisis’"

sjy — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 13:37:40 +0000

The UK telecommunications regulator, Ofcom, publishes some useful annual research on this topic [1]. According to the media use and attitudes report 2023 [2]:

> Smartphone ownership shifts markedly in [the children aged 8-11] group, which correlates with the children’s transition to secondary school … As reported by parents, more than half of 8-11-year-olds (55%) owned a mobile phone, a significant increase on children aged 3-4 and 5-7 (both at 20%).

[1]: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/research-and-data/media-literacy-re...

[2]: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0027/255852/...

New comment by sjy in "PyPI Was Subpoenaed"

sjy — Wed, 24 May 2023 23:51:17 +0000

What about a ransomware, phishing or data breach victim? Cybercrimes are often committed by organised criminals and investigating them seems like the most obvious reason for the DOJ to issue a subpoena to PyPI.

New comment by sjy in "WhatsApp could disappear from UK over privacy concerns, ministers told"

sjy — Fri, 19 May 2023 16:58:09 +0000

An excellent source of information on the motives of UK legislators for passing this legislation, other than the incompetence and malice hypothesised in the other comments, is this parliamentary research briefing from 2022 [1], which summarises the previous five years of consultation and links to a heap of previous white papers and critical responses.

The "news" is that on 17 April 2023, the heads of WhatsApp, Signal and other companies published an open letter questioning "the Government's stated intention to protect end-to-end encryption and respect the human right to privacy" [2], and on 27 April 2023, a member of the House of Lords said that "services such as WhatsApp will potentially leave the UK" [3] if the Bill is passed. The debate is actually pretty informed and a refreshing antidote to the cynicism about democracy expressed elsewhere, until you recall that the House of Lords is not that democratic.

[1]: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

[2]: https://blog.whatsapp.com/an-open-letter

[3]: https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2023-04-27/debates/AC7C7...

New comment by sjy in "WhatsApp could disappear from UK over privacy concerns, ministers told"

sjy — Fri, 19 May 2023 16:28:32 +0000

If the terrorists and child sexual abusers move to Telegram or some other more underground app, the Online Safety Bill will have partly achieved its purpose: to make social media safer for normal people using mainstream social networks. Currently we rely on the content policy and moderation staff of big tech companies to censor the surprising amount of illegal content that is constantly posted on social media [1]. The UK government wants to assume more control over this process with new powers that are legally restricted to what is "necessary and proportionate." They don't expect this to inconvenience the rest of the electorate, they expect it to reduce crime and other online harms.

[1]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

New comment by sjy in "Language models can explain neurons in language models"

sjy — Wed, 10 May 2023 06:57:14 +0000

Fine-tuning requires you to train the model with a set of prompts and desired completions. Building a suitable dataset is not trivial and it's not clear what it would mean to use a book for fine-tuning anyway – masking sentences and paragraphs and training the model to complete them in the book's style?

New comment by sjy in "Stack Overflow Is ChatGPT Casualty Traffic Down 14% in March"

sjy — Mon, 08 May 2023 04:44:30 +0000

These restrictions go away once you get 200 reputation on any Stack Exchange site. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/141648/what-is-the-...

New comment by sjy in "Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”"

sjy — Fri, 05 May 2023 00:39:20 +0000

Run text-generation-webui with llama.cpp: https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui