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Classical statues were not painted horribly

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/were-classical-statues-painted-horribly/
188•bensouthwood•2h ago•92 comments

Please Just Try Htmx

http://pleasejusttryhtmx.com/
46•iNic•1h ago•25 comments

Virtualizing Nvidia HGX B200 GPUs with Open Source

https://www.ubicloud.com/blog/virtualizing-nvidia-hgx-b200-gpus-with-open-source
40•ben_s•1h ago•5 comments

Using TypeScript to Obtain One of the Rarest License Plates

https://www.jack.bio/blog/licenseplate
13•lafond•24m ago•2 comments

Show HN: A local-first memory store for LLM agents (SQLite)

https://github.com/CaviraOSS/OpenMemory
16•nullure•4d ago•3 comments

Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/17/are-apple-gift-cards-safe-to-redeem
82•tosh•58m ago•29 comments

Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/code-proven-to-work/
47•simonw•33m ago•43 comments

Spain fines Airbnb €65M: Why the government is cracking down on illegal rentals

https://www.euronews.com/travel/2025/12/15/spain-fines-airbnb-65-million-why-the-government-is-cr...
33•robtherobber•36m ago•2 comments

Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles for you

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/12/jonathan-blow-has-spent-the-past-decade-designing-1400-puz...
143•furcyd•6d ago•169 comments

Slowness is a virtue

https://blog.jakobschwichtenberg.com/p/slowness-is-a-virtue
150•jakobgreenfeld•4h ago•55 comments

RCE via ND6 Router Advertisements in FreeBSD

https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-25:12.rtsold.asc
88•weeha•7h ago•44 comments

Creating apps like Signal could be 'hostile activity' claims UK watchdog

https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/creating-apps-like-signal-or-whatsapp-could-be...
211•donohoe•4h ago•156 comments

Hightouch (YC S19) Is Hiring

https://hightouch.com/careers
1•joshwget•3h ago

Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-3-flash/
1052•meetpateltech•22h ago•552 comments

Egyptian Hieroglyphs: Lesson 1

https://www.egyptianhieroglyphs.net/egyptian-hieroglyphs/lesson-1/
119•jameslk•9h ago•43 comments

After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up

https://e360.yale.edu/features/iran-water-drought-dams-qanats
222•YaleE360•4h ago•166 comments

I got hacked: My Hetzner server started mining Monero

https://blog.jakesaunders.dev/my-server-started-mining-monero-this-morning/
509•jakelsaunders94•18h ago•318 comments

It's all about momentum

https://combo.cc/posts/its-all-about-momentum-innit/
81•sph•5h ago•26 comments

Show HN: X Writer – VS Code extension to post tweets from your editor

https://github.com/Jawuilp/X-writer
10•jawuilp•19h ago•4 comments

What is an elliptic curve? (2019)

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/02/21/what-is-an-elliptic-curve/
108•tzury•8h ago•12 comments

Online Textbook for Braid groups and knots and tangles

https://matthematics.com/redoak/redoak.html
34•marysminefnuf•5h ago•2 comments

From profiling to kernel patch: the journey to an eBPF performance fix

https://rovarma.com/articles/from-profiling-to-kernel-patch-the-journey-to-an-ebpf-performance-fix/
17•todsacerdoti•4d ago•1 comments

Most parked domains now serving malicious content

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/12/most-parked-domains-now-serving-malicious-content/
65•bookofjoe•2h ago•16 comments

Coursera to combine with Udemy

https://investor.coursera.com/news/news-details/2025/Coursera-to-Combine-with-Udemy-to-Empower-th...
557•throwaway019254•1d ago•332 comments

AI helps ship faster but it produces 1.7× more bugs

https://www.coderabbit.ai/blog/state-of-ai-vs-human-code-generation-report
48•birdculture•2h ago•53 comments

Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)

https://jsomers.net/blog/speed-matters
220•bschne•3d ago•108 comments

Building a High-Performance OpenAPI Parser in Go

https://www.speakeasy.com/blog/building-speakeasy-openapi-go-library
32•subomi•3d ago•9 comments

The Big City; Save the Flophouses (1996)

https://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/14/magazine/the-big-city-save-the-flophouses.html
18•ChadNauseam•3d ago•4 comments

Fluent: A Localization System for Natural-Sounding Translations

https://projectfluent.org/
14•stefankuehnel•4d ago•3 comments

Breaking Paragraphs into Lines [pdf] (1981)

https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/tex/1981-knuth.pdf
27•Smaug123•6d ago•6 comments
Open in hackernews

A school locked down after AI flagged a gun. It was a clarinet

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/12/17/ai-gun-school-detection/
86•reaperducer•3h ago

Comments

CoastalCoder•3h ago
Good grief, imagine if it had been an oboe.
ablation•2h ago
A weapon of mass diminuendo.
adzm•1h ago
Or a bassoon!!
derelicta•3h ago
Just ban music instruments altogether then! No need to fix the dang LLM prompt this way! /s
Zobat•3h ago
They tried to find contraband, they found a marching band!
gosub100•2h ago
The sleazy AI company that sold this "tech" to the school has to face the music.
b112•1h ago
Sleazy? I'll have you know, the ToS clearly says it's in beta.
sunrunner•2h ago
Next time the contraband could be a contrabassoon.
bryanrasmussen•2h ago
Seventy-six trombones caught the morning sun

With a hundred and ten cornets right behind

The AI thought about it long and hard

calling up the national guard

Cause of the horns of ev'ry shape and kind.

---

There were copper bottom tympani in horse platoons

Thundering, thundering all along the way.

Double bell euphoniums and big bassoons,

And Swarming SWAT Teams Goons so they say

---

There were cross fires and blown tires

And reporters from the local news

Clarinets of ev'ry size

And trumpeters who'd improvise

And video games that went pew-pew!

----

on multiple edits: tried to find a layout that fit the song

kotaKat•2h ago
Those banned band books… they might have come across One Thousand and One Vulgar Marching Band Formations!
swarnie•2h ago
I have so, so many questions.....

Why are there cameras in schools? Why are they looking for guns? Why are they using AI to do it?

Could this not all be avoided by not letting kids have guns or am i missing the point?

spicyusername•2h ago
There are cameras in schools for the same reasons there are cameras anywhere, to try to maximize accountability.

Kids are already not allowed to have guns.

lotsofpulp•2h ago
As a parent, I would like more cameras in schools, since students’ abuse gets ignored, and the person fighting back gets more punishment than the instigator.
theoreticalmal•2h ago
How would cameras solve the punishment issue? Aren’t most schools still “zero tolerance” for physical violence?
narag•2h ago
The post you are responding to is about punishing the victim because teachers are too lazy/cowards to punish the culprits. Cams incentivize them to do the right thing.
exe34•2h ago
Does it work? I'd be interested to know if you know of any statistics around this.
LtWorf•2h ago
Probably not but won't you think of the children?
IAmBroom•1h ago
It would take the incident from "he said/she said" to video evidence. Why wouldn't that work?
narag•1h ago
Are you interested in the statistics or in knowing if I know any?

I hate camera proliferation but, judging by the YouTube plenty of bodycam footage, it does work.

You won't likely find the numbers you want because the very nature of the problem is that cameras make visible something that wasn't.

robryk•9m ago
Even if the situations are noticed and seen fully, does it cause the schools to not punish the victim? The stories I've heard about zero tolerance policies were that _even when the situation was fully obvious_, victims got punished because they took part in an altercation.
adrian_b•2h ago
As a former student/child, who fortunately has grown up in a place where none of the ridiculous restrictions typical for US schools existed, I find extremely sad that there are such places on Earth where the management of a school has decreed that the student was guilty even without possessing any weapon because "was holding his musical instrument like a rifle".

If not even the children can play any more however they want, for fear that automated surveillance would identify them as "pretending to have a weapon", which can result in punishment, I believe that such a society has serious problems for which it certainly did not find the right solution. I would not want for myself or for my children to live in such a place.

IAmBroom•1h ago
As someone who read the actual article, nowhere did it say that the student was decreed guilty. In fact, the police explicitly said "no further action was needed." Unclutch your pearls.
whynotmaybe•2h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...
PurpleRamen•1h ago
Because USA, land of the free, and armed.. There is too much violence and tools enabling there, so everyone needs ways to survive. Cams are useful to locate all kind of problems; gun are not the only tool used.. I guess this is the price of liberty.
wat10000•1h ago
How do you propose to not let kids have guns?
gambiting•1h ago
Because every other country on the planet when faced with the same kind of issue tightened its gun controls in response - Britain had a famous school shooting which immediately led to outlawing all hangun possession by private individuals, there hasn't been a shooting since(despite gun ownership in the UK being actually relatively high, it's pretty common for farmers to have shotguns). In contrast, whenever a school shooting happens in the US(and it's almost 100% every single day of the year now), legislators propose loosening gun restrictions to solve the issue. With some prominent voices saying that well if only teachers were armed, this wouldn't be a problem. And thus, the school shootings in the US not only happen every day, they are such a normal occurance that no one protests at the idea of automated AI cameras scanning students for weapons or schools having metal detectors or armed officers on site, all of which are insane in pretty much every other society. But no, in US you can't solve that - and I have no doubts that we'll have replies to this very comment explaining why US is so special that these same measures couldn't possibly work or worse - how those daily school shootings are a necessary price to pay for freedom of gun ownership and upholding the constitution.
theandrewbailey•2h ago
https://archive.ph/WbOWl
vdupras•2h ago
Next up, the guy, probably named Buttle, will get billed for the intervention.
delichon•2h ago
It’s all perfectly in order. We have the receipt.
Joeboy•1h ago
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH HIS BODY!?

Edit: I don't know about these specific lines, but this script was co-written by the great and recently deceased Tom Stoppard

saidnooneever•2h ago
weapon of brass destruction
theflyingelvis•2h ago
At least it wasn’t a percussive device
Rooster61•43m ago
If it was, they'd need to get the cops on the horn quickly
rmunn•2h ago
This hardly needs to be said here, but there should have been human review of the AI output before taking any drastic action. That would (I assume, though since I can't read the original article I don't know if that assumption is correct) have immediately let them know that the alleged "gun" was nothing of the sort, and avoided the massive disruption of a totally unnecessary lockdown.
nucleardog•2h ago
Not sure how much that would help overall.

Unless it's completely clear that it's not a gun, the reviewer is essentially always going to pull the alarm. The risk of a false alarm is going to be seen as minimal, while the risk of a false negative is catastrophic.

False alarm makes the news for now because it's novel, we all go "What the hell, guys?" and life goes on.

Nobody wants to end up sitting in front of a prosecutor, the media, etc explaining why they chose not to pull the alarm, when the AI _clearly_ identified the gun, and instead chose to let all those kids die.

jermaustin1•1h ago
One more instance of offloading blame to a computer system: "It's not my fault the cops shot the kid, the system said it was a gun."

The only way this gets fixed is if there are consequences at every level for false positives.

WillAdams•1h ago
One approach for this is that the person who makes the call needs to be on-site and in the front of the situation --- similarly, a judge signing off on a No-Knock Warrant --- the judge needs to be at least be present, and should be required to walk through the building/home/apartment after the warrant is served. If it's not important/severe enough for a judge to do this, then I would argue that there's no need for the "no knock" aspect.
brk•1h ago
That sounds good on paper, but is really impossible to implement in any practical way.

In this case, the kid was holding the clarinet like a weapon, and though we have not seen the actual video, the descriptions of it make it sound like overall resolution was poor.

The alternative to the false positive here, is to not report anything that you cannot be 110% certain of, which means that you're likely to miss some true positives.

Overall this situation mostly reads like everything worked as intended, and the press turned it into more than it needed to be. School shooting are a real thing, there is plenty of evidence of that. Weapons detection has become a necessary component of a school safety strategy. For many reasons, it is not practical to have personnel at the school, or within the district, act as the first-pass reviewer of AI detections of weapons.

Zigurd•35m ago
Don't be defeatist. The situation under consideration here is probably monitored by security cameras and body cams end to end. Everyone not following correct protocol did so on camera. Punishing willful ignorance and incompetence is certainly possible.
dpoloncsak•58m ago
>The only way this gets fixed is if there are consequences at every level for false positives.

Do we really want consequences for false positives? If a kid is smoking a cigarette in the bathroom and the smoke detector goes off, the school should evacuate. The Smoke Alarm went off. No principal is going to sign off on the assumption that "Timmy is smoking, it's not a real fire". The principal shouldn't be punished for responding to the alarm. Timmy...probably should get reprimanded, but that feels off-metaphor.

In the example we are given, Timmy did nothing wrong. Having a clarinet is not contraband, and he should not be punished. The admin who called a lockdown did nothing wrong, as they were responding to the system in the way they were trained to use it. This is all in the name of safety, where things are done in 'an abundance of caution'.

>"It's not my fault the cops shot the kid, the system said it was a gun."

No, its the cop's fault. The cop hasn't been trained to use the AI security system, and is instead given their own SOP for assessing threats.

LexGray•20m ago
Make the failure billable for failures in the contract as it is a significant downtime.

For every false alarm you need to pay the salaries that were wasted and the snacks and therapists for the kids.

Likewise for every missed gun hazard pay for teachers and therapists for kids.

If they aren’t confident enough to back a service that has such a mental impact on failure they should not be selling it.

htek•1h ago
This is just conjecture, but I suspect there will be as much review of photos, application of good investigative work and overall professionalism as is conducted during anonymous, virtually untraceable Swatting incidents that terrify the victims, if not get them killed.
j-conn•1h ago
There was. From the article: '''

ZeroEyes said that trained employees review alerts before they are sent and that its software can make a lifesaving difference in averting mass shootings by alerting law enforcement to weapons on campus within seconds. At Lawton Chiles, the student flagged by ZeroEyes was holding his musical instrument like a rifle, co-founder Sam Alaimo told The Washington Post. “We don’t think we made an error, nor does the school,” Alaimo said. “That was better to dispatch [police] than not dispatch.”

'''

brk•1h ago
This appears to be a ZeroEyes customer, which means there was a human in the loop. One of ZeroEyes' main selling points is their use of 24/7 staffed SOCs to review anything the AI software flags before sending an actual alert to the site/customer.
Zigurd•37m ago
Nearly all police responses in the US are armed responses. Americans don't realize how dangerous that is. They recognize swatting as a crime, but don't realize that a Karen who lies to police in order to get them to bully someone they don't like is very dangerous. Comparable to aggressive driving and road rage. It needs to be prosecuted more often. By more often I mean more than zero.
Vinnl•2h ago
I feel like as soon as a particular type of student learns that this is used, they'll have an excellent way to get that test that they didn't study for postponed, and even have plausible deniability that they didn't intend to lock the school down. At least for the first one or two times, after that it's back to triggering the fire alarm.
estimator7292•1h ago
At my high school it was bomb threats. At least two or three a year
bluGill•1h ago
That happened at my mom's school (back in the 1960s) until the school put all the kids on a bus and brought them to the local armory gym and made all student sit quietly (no talking) on the floor until the end of the school day. Once the bomb threat wasn't a way to get out of school on a nice day there was never another one.

I'm not sure how to apply that to this situation, but it is one every school should think about when students try things.

aleph_minus_one•1h ago
> Once the bomb threat wasn't a way to get out of school on a nice day there was never another one.

If I think of my school time, I would believe even the fact that a bomb threat would be an annoyance to teachers would a be sufficient reason (of course, in the schools of the country where I live there were other methods than bomb threats to be an annoyance to teachers).

Zigurd•48m ago
That depends on who you think needs to learn a lesson about buying an AI from Temu.
throw8404049rj•36m ago
That is a child abuse!

Solution is to make school non mandatory!

m4ck_•2h ago
On a long enough timeline, without any changes, this garbage is going to get a kid murdered by overzealous LEOs (or teachers in places where they want the carrying.)
avs733•2h ago
“School resource officers” shoot kids (and themselves) with terrifying frequency, the kids typically unarmed and often autistic/neurodivergent.

(The worlds laziest lit review) https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=school+resource+office+shoots...

gosub100•2h ago
Or the next shooter will disguise their gun to look like a musical instrument.

Edit: I can't find it now but there is a body cam video of a Colorado school shooting where this almost happened. It wasn't due to an AI mixup but the school police was armed and I believe fired at one of the bad guys, but as the local PD responded he almost got shot because of the confusion: "school shooting, respond, guy with a gun"

bluGill•1h ago
That has been a common trope in gangster movies for ages. A violin case can easially hide a gun (depending on the gun of course, but you get to select this). You can find craftsmen in your gang who can make a violin case that also has a gun so it can even be opened an inspected by someone who doesn't know how to find the secret gun compartment, and it isn't hard to teach someone to play some simple songs on a violin thus giving a reason to carry a violin (you don't need to be good, just be able to show you have another lesson next week). I don't know if this works as well in the real world as movies, but it is plausible.
jonhohle•54m ago
Also the plot of El Mariachi https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0104815/ and its sequel, Desperado.
1over137•2h ago
What is LEOs?
fredoralive•2h ago
Law Enforcement Officers, ie the Police.
Stephen304•2h ago
Law enforcement officer, or police.
miltonlost•42m ago
ironically LEO stands for pig
lingrush4•59m ago
What's your point?

If the technology is even somewhat capable of detecting actual guns, it will probably save far more lives in the long run.

Zigurd•46m ago
Cops killed a lot of people with negligible effect on crime. You're making an assertion that needs some support in light of the track record of US policing.
mikeyouse•32m ago
The obvious outcome of increased security and scanning to get into schools is what happened at Annunciation where the shooter just shot from outside the security area since all of those people still gather and walk past unsecured areas.

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

expedition32•25m ago
I thought it was legal in America to bear arms? Is the constitution magically suspended in schools?
drysart•5m ago
In many ways, yes. With guns specifically, the Supreme Court (in opinions authored by Justices Alito and Kavanaugh, believe it or not) has set a precedent that there are some government-controlled "sensitive places" within which it is reasonable and prudent to place restrictions on firearms. Legislative assemblies, courthouses, government buildings, etc.

So not even the most conservative justices buy into the idea that Americans have a right to bear arms everywhere.

TheCraiggers•2h ago
Well at least it wasn't a bag of chips this time. A clarinet is at least a step towards the correct shape. Sounds like the AI training is going well!
GaryBluto•2h ago
As much as I believe this is a story that needs to be told, why did the author of the article choose one of those annoying two-sentence millennial titles? Do they actually generate more publicity?

A man saw a snappy two-sentence title. He was mildly annoyed.

rwmj•1h ago
It's not exactly the same situation, but this happened before AI. At least the clarinet owner didn't get shot & killed like this guy:

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

On 22 September 1999, Stanley was returning home from the Alexandra Pub in South Hackney carrying, in a plastic bag, a table leg that had been repaired by his brother earlier that day. Someone had phoned the police to report "an Irishman with a gun wrapped in a bag".[2]

ramon156•1h ago
> the prosecution evidence is insufficient to rebut the officers' assertion that they were acting in self defence

Awesome, they got away with unlawfully killing a man.

justin66•28m ago
In protest at the suspensions, over 120 out of the 400 Metropolitan Police officers authorised to use firearms handed in their firearms authorisation cards, with Glen Smyth, a Police Federation spokesman saying, "The officers are very concerned that the tactics they are trained in, as a consequence of the verdict, are now in doubt."[10] The officers' suspensions were lifted shortly afterwards.[11]

What a joke.

neom•1h ago
https://archive.is/WbOWl
IAmBroom•1h ago
Lots of jokes made, but in reality this mistake could have been made by a real human watching a video feed. The student was intentionally mimicking a weapon with a long, tubular object. It's not like he was just walking down the hall with it in his hands, and suddenly SWAT TEAM!

AI is often awful, but I'm giving it a pass on this one.

bluGill•1h ago
I can't give a pass - kids do things like this often enough that you can't call the police on every incident. Sure it might be stupid for kids to do, but they do it, and since it isn't a real gun it is harmless fun until someone overreacts. The real issue here is fatigue: the more you overreact the less your seriously you are taken when something really does happen.

Once you can make a mistake and be okay, but you soon you become "the little boy who cried wolf", and people don't move to safety when there is a real issue!

rascul•1h ago
> “We don’t think we made an error, nor does the school,” Alaimo said. “That was better to dispatch [police] than not dispatch.”

Of course the co-founder of the company that made the error would say that.

catlikesshrimp•56m ago
Another false positive of a system working as intended.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45684934 (the doritos gun)

WhyOhWhyQ•55m ago
Is the gun situation hopeless in America? As far as I can tell, we just need to reduce the quantity of guns. Somehow 20% of the country takes that idea as an existential threat, even though not doing so is a material threat to real people.

If it's actually a mental health crisis, then how do we solve that one? Especially with what the Republicans are doing right now?

blibble•47m ago
the guns don't even seem to work for their supposed primary purpose

uninvited and unwanted federal troops are roaming around cities against the wishes of state governors

so seems the US has the worst of both worlds: unqualified morons owning assault weapons, plus the tyranny

miltonlost•44m ago
Because you have Republicmas idiotically saying "Guns don't kill people; people do" and then don't do anything about the people or the guns. Conservative gun owners simply accept that people must die by guns in order for them to feel safe and make us all more vulnerable because of their irrational fears. They're babies with weapons.
stephenhuey•16m ago
That's simplistic. Actually, to better understand the situation you must follow the money. Many 2nd Amendment supporters are reasonable, but unfortunately, over decades their casual support has been utilized by lobbyists whose goals do not necessarily align with many supporters. The challenge is to communicate that message in a way that reaches everyone.
WhyOhWhyQ•2m ago
We just need to reduce the number of guns. I've not met a 2nd amendment supporter who understands this basic idea. They are always convinced one of the following retorts should be the end of the conversation (they also proudly think you've never heard these cliched arguments):

- They have knife stabbings in China. (Yes. A gun is more lethal.)

- A bad guy can still get a gun. (Yes.)

- Hand guns are more dangerous than rifles. (This means let's reduce both.)

- The gun doesn't kill people. People kill people. (This means let's reduce how many people have guns.)

- Mass shootings aren't the majority of gun deaths. (Let's reduce the total gun deaths and mass shootings then.)

Come up with as many ridiculous retorts as you like. If you had reduced the total number of guns, most of the shootings could not have happened.

jasonlotito•39m ago
The thing I think about is that, as far as the two major parties are concerned, they both support denying Americans the right to bear arms, and they both support gun control. The difference is that one party won't admit to it, making any debate difficult or impossible.

On the flip side, I feel like the two parties see things differently: One party is mostly about prevention, while the other side is predominantly about punishment.

> If it's actually a mental health crisis,

That's the scapegoat. It's an easy scapegoat because it blames others. And others are easy to hate. They aren't us. "They" are others. Yes, mental health is an issue, but it's not so much higher than in other nations to explain the much higher rate. It's a scapegoat because it's easy to say, "Wow, no normal person would do that, so they must be crazy." That sounds reasonable if you don't think about it for a moment.

WhyOhWhyQ•37m ago
I think it's a scapegoat, but I want to give the scapegoaters a chance to show their asses, and I mean show whatever study they've got to see if there's anything there.
another_twist•17m ago
Its weird how object detection models are "AI" now. These models and their weird errors have been around for quite a while. The issue is vendors claiming that there is no chance of errors. Ideally you would have a 2 eyes system such that if AI has a tolerable false positive rate and have a human review. But of course, you cant fire people with AI so why would we do the sane thing.

And of course there are policy wonks who would make gun ownership a human rights issue even though its fundamentally unsafe to have such free gun ownership.

Ghoelian•8m ago
According to the article, they did have a human verify the images before sending the alert. Apparently they and the school still think they made the right call.