Hacker News: wl

New comment by wl in "The FBI Wants to Buy Nationwide Access to License Plate Readers"

wl — Mon, 18 May 2026 23:33:11 +0000

It’d be hard to keep individuals from doing this. But individuals aren’t running networks of cameras. Companies are. Those companies probably couldn’t fly under the radar selling LPR data if the practice was banned.

New comment by wl in "Show HN: We missed Winamp, so we built an audio player for macOS"

wl — Mon, 18 May 2026 21:25:08 +0000

It seems like most of the iTunes hate has historically come from people who used iTunes on Windows because they needed to use it to sync their iPods. Apparently it wasn't very good on Windows?

I do agree that it had been getting worse and worse on Mac before it was rebranded "Music" in 2019.

New comment by wl in "Dogme 25 – Vow of Chastity (2025)"

wl — Mon, 18 May 2026 13:26:13 +0000

Perhaps Dogme 95/Dogma 25 films are in a genre of their own, but they're not "genre movies." People make the same argument with "literary fiction"/"non-genre fiction" vs "genre fiction." The terms have meaning whether or not you want to acknowledge it.

New comment by wl in "A lost ancient script reveals how writing as we know it began"

wl — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:16:07 +0000

The polysemic nature of Egyptian hieroglyphic signs is hardly the main issue with learning to read ancient Egyptian. If you're a beginner slogging through elementary translation exercises, the determinatives and phonetic complements help a lot. If you've studied the signs, grammar, and vocabulary you actually need to read texts, you've already gained understanding of the context needed to interpret the function of individual signs.

New comment by wl in "A lost ancient script reveals how writing as we know it began"

wl — Tue, 12 May 2026 12:50:59 +0000

I don't get your quibble about "cursive" not being an appropriate way to describe hieratic. Pretty much every Egyptologist I've heard speak on the matter uses the term "cursive," with Demotic often described as "even more cursive." And I've copied quite a bit of it and it is far faster to write with a nice fountain pen than even "cursive" hieroglyphs. It's not particularly difficult, either. Sure, it's more complex than an abjad or an alphabet, but I don't see what that has to do with anything. The complexity is far more in reading it than writing it. If we're going to talk about difficulty in both reading and writing, Demotic is worse. And let's not even get into Ptolemaic-period hieroglyphs...

New comment by wl in "A lost ancient script reveals how writing as we know it began"

wl — Tue, 12 May 2026 11:34:57 +0000

Egyptian hieroglyphs are mostly phonetic. You can represent any abstract concept in it that you could in the spoken version.

New comment by wl in "Refuse to let your doctor record you"

wl — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 16:31:49 +0000

I got an erroneous Type II diabetes diagnosis dropped into the note by the AI scribe at my last appointment because my PCP discussed the A1C test he was ordering. Would not recommend. That isn't to say that manually typed notes or speech to text dictated notes are perfect (dot phrases have ended up "documenting" plenty of conversations that never happened), but a false diagnosis of a chronic disease seems like a really bad failure.

New comment by wl in "Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th"

wl — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 01:32:15 +0000

One of my hobbies is typesetting modern editions of a certain type of rare, obscure old books that were poorly typeset to begin with. Modern OCR—and I’ve tried plenty of tools—is still rather error prone in my application.

New comment by wl in "We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees"

wl — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 16:12:38 +0000

> Some days it'll mark legitimate transaction emails from major companies as spam

I get legitimate transactional emails intended for someone else and those senders refuse to stop them because I'm not their customer and only their customer can request account updates. Those get marked as spam.

New comment by wl in "Police used AI facial recognition to wrongly arrest TN woman for crimes in ND"

wl — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 19:48:53 +0000

They really aren’t. Qualified immunity is probably too strong, but litigants get past it all the time.

On the other hand, judges have absolute immunity for actions taken in the course of their judicial duties.

New comment by wl in "Police used AI facial recognition to wrongly arrest TN woman for crimes in ND"

wl — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 20:40:59 +0000

Especially considering the judge is the only person involved in this who is completely immune from being sued.

New comment by wl in "Cloudflare flags archive.today as "C&C/Botnet"; no longer resolves via 1.1.1.2"

wl — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 21:31:55 +0000

Which pages have they been caught modifying? And where's the evidence? I've seen this accusation multiple times but never with concrete details.

New comment by wl in "Afroman found not liable in defamation case"

wl — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 03:00:56 +0000

Perhaps it should be, but the courts have not agreed. See Pena v. Los Angeles for an example of an appellate case that rejected this argument. It found that a "police power" exception to the takings clause applies in such cases.

New comment by wl in "Afroman found not liable in defamation case"

wl — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 15:56:29 +0000

The laws that provide a right of action against the government generally don’t cover damages caused by police in the lawful exercise of their duties.

So yeah, sovereign immunity.

New comment by wl in "Afroman found not liable in defamation case"

wl — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:14:32 +0000

They chose not to do so. And the courts are no help, because generally speaking, you can't sue the government unless there's a specific law allowing you to do so (sovereign immunity). The police as individuals are generally immune from civil suits unless they violated some clearly established right (qualified immunity).

New comment by wl in "Peter Thiel's Antichrist Lectures"

wl — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 13:26:05 +0000

Blame William Miller for American Evangelicalism's preoccupation with the end times.

New comment by wl in "Peter Thiel's Antichrist Lectures"

wl — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:04:49 +0000

The land of Israel has been a vassal state or part of another state or empire for most of recorded history. Israel becoming an independent state in 1948 ties in with messianic prophesy.

New comment by wl in "Never buy a .online domain"

wl — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 04:10:24 +0000

I never expected to need to recover the account because I used a strong password stored in a password manager that I had adequately secured and backed up.

New comment by wl in "Never buy a .online domain"

wl — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:46:09 +0000

I have the same issue. At the time I created the account that I'm locked out of, Google said nothing about these "recovery" email addresses as 2FA. Years passed without any notice that maybe they were going to lock me out of an account I have the password for. No notice that I had better have access to that "recovery" email address that I hadn't bothered to keep up to date because I never thought I'd need to "recover" the account from Google. (In my case, it's an old .edu email address that I was promised "for life".)

If Google wanted to lock me out of my account for my own good until I enabled 2FA, fine. But as GP stated, they abused the recovery email addresses to force 2FA on people and ended up locking some people out of their accounts.

New comment by wl in "Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy"

wl — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 17:09:32 +0000

Hittite was putting spaces between words in the 17th century BCE. And if we're just interested in Latin, it used the interpunct as a word divider hundreds of years before the use of the space as word divider happened. The use of scriptio continua despite knowledge of word dividers was a choice.