freddie_mercury (u/freddie_mercury)

freddie_mercury commented on Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts petapixel.com/2025/08/20/... · Posted by u/mikece

danpalmer · 5 days ago

> i.e. to get them above a theft threshhold, at which point prosecution becomes easier

This feels like it should be illegal. Holding back on reporting or prosecuting until you think you're more likely to get a conviction or a bigger conviction, feels close to entrapment.

To do otherwise is just unnecessarily vindictive, showing that it's the punishment that matters more than the prevention.

freddie_mercury · 5 days ago

Is it really any different than the thief who steals things just under the felony limit...but does it every day?

In Texas the felony limit is $2,500. Is stealing $1000 on Monday, $1000 on Tuesday, and $1000 on Wednesday really so much better than stealing $3,000 on Monday?

freddie_mercury commented on A statistical analysis of Rotten Tomatoes statsignificant.com/p/is-... · Posted by u/m463

neilv · 5 days ago

> To account for this influx of reviewers, Rotten Tomatoes has created a "Top Critic" designation reserved for established media outlets, such as The New York Times and The Atlantic. However, this label has no special bearing on a film's top-line Tomatometer score and is largely incorporated into ancillary aspects of the site.

Just last night, I noticed that I could access the two percentage scores for critic reviews.

If you go to "https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_dilemma", and click on the critic reviews percentage (25%), you get a popup that lets you select between seeing the All Critics score (25%) and Top Critics score (28%).

(And if I'd thought to check Rotten Tomatoes first, when selecting what looked like a fun light comedy on Netflix, I wouldn't have wasted an hour of my life before I said WTF, checked RT, and continued to be in a bad mood.)

Incidentally, I'd love to have the Tomatometer score integrated into my UI for video streaming services. The services seem to instead like to use their own very generous scoring instead. (When they show any score at all. Some like to suppress the ratings for new shows they produced, presumably to avoid shooting down their own poor shows before people watch them by default.) But Rotten Tomatoes is a much better predictor of how I'll like a show than the streaming service scores are. But maybe the streaming services don't want to expose that the majority of the movies and series offered at any time now range from mediocre to outright bad.

freddie_mercury · 5 days ago

Rotten Tomatoes licensing for a major streaming platform would probably be millions of dollars a year.

https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/4649rw/comment/d03a...

freddie_mercury commented on Family Farm Wins Historic Case After Feds Violate Constitution and Ruin Business agweb.com/news/business/f... · Posted by u/storf45

arcfour · 5 days ago

It was interesting to read about the impact that unconstitutional actions by the government had on actual people in a real case, and how a Supreme Court ruling remedied it (partially). What a bizarre response. Do you have something against these people or something?

freddie_mercury · 5 days ago

I found the initial lack of mention of the recent Supreme Court ruling weird and when I read the actual Circuit Court decision I felt the actual article was bad, biased journalism bordering on outright lying.

The article spends a lot of time telling us about this fourth generation farm and telling us about workers who quit after one day.

The actual circuit decision says they didn't provide adequate housing -- failing to put insect screens on doors and windows leading to an insect infestation and putting mattresses directly on the floor which is known to create mold. They also failed to provide free food as required and even started selling beverages at profit with no notice you the workers. They are also supposed to provide free transportation but were found to be using drivers who were driving illegally without licenses in all 5 vehicles.

I'm in favor of them getting a trial in a real court but the whole article smells fishy to me and came across as incredibly biased.

freddie_mercury commented on Family Farm Wins Historic Case After Feds Violate Constitution and Ruin Business agweb.com/news/business/f... · Posted by u/storf45

freddie_mercury · 5 days ago

Kind of weird framing as "historic" and "violated the Constitution" when the actual decision from the court just says,

"Following the Supreme Court’s recent decision in SEC v. Jarkesy, 603 U.S. 109 (2024), we hold that Sun Valley was entitled to have its case decided by an Article III court."

Usually it is a non-story when lower courts start following a brand new Supreme Court precedent. Not sure why this one is on HN or why even really why it warranted 10,000 words in the original link.

freddie_mercury commented on Weather Radar APIs in 2025: A Founder's Complete Market Overview rainviewer.com/blog/weath... · Posted by u/sea-gold

dlcarrier · 9 days ago

Commercial weather APIs usually consolidate information most governments provide for free, for the benefit of nautical/aeronautical trade. If you just need local data, search for you government's API.

Here's the National Weather Service API, for those in the US: https://api.weather.gov

freddie_mercury · 7 days ago

Yep, everyone I know in Australia just uses the BOM (the government bureau of meteorology) app. (If they aren't just using whatever build in weather app they have, that is.)

I've never understood what benefit any other app could provide given they are just ingesting the BOM data.

freddie_mercury commented on Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy theguardian.com/film/2025... · Posted by u/nemoniac

DHRicoF · 11 days ago

Netflix and to some level spotify drowned piracy for a time. But then a lot of companies tried to rap the same "winings" splitting the ecosystem and trashing the user experience.

- ¿could we watch x movie? - let me see. no, it in this other service beside the 3 we are paying.

freddie_mercury · 11 days ago

I lived in a country where Netflix never bothered to open up (until very recently) so piracy never went away for the 100 million people living there.

freddie_mercury commented on US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/master_crab

isbwkisbakadqv · 11 days ago

2.8% doesn’t seem that crazy to me? Don’t we target like 2-2.5?

freddie_mercury · 11 days ago

The target is 2%, not 2-2.5.

Being off by 40% is cause for alarm in almost any circumstance.

freddie_mercury commented on FFmpeg 8.0 adds Whisper support code.ffmpeg.org/FFmpeg/FF... · Posted by u/rilawa

jiehong · 12 days ago

Those burned in subtitles still aren’t as cool as theme-matched anime subtitles during intro music sequences from fansubs 15 years ago.

Those are still cool IMO

freddie_mercury · 12 days ago

I recently discovered that the Internet Archive has the Tomodachi fansubs of Fushigi Yugi which, at least in my experience, were the most famous example of that technique.

https://archive.org/details/tomodachi-fushigi-yugi-vhsrip

freddie_mercury commented on Coursera’s Preview Mode classcentral.com/report/c... · Posted by u/deepakkarki

rgavuliak · 21 days ago

> MOOCs never achieved the transformative potential promised during the early hype.

I would disagree, I saw a lot of people, especially in the Data Science field that got up-skilled by back then free Coursera.

freddie_mercury · 19 days ago

The early hype of MOOCs wasn't "a few people in handful of fields will get up-skilled".

If that was all they claimed there wouldn't have been early hype around transformative potential.

Coursera had 1.7 million "students" in under 2 years and was growing faster than Facebook. The President of edX talked about "disrupting" the entire higher education system. Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, and Duke all offered MOOCs with the idea that anyone anywhere in the world could now get an MIT/Stanford level of education without needing to be on-campus (or pay a lot of money in tuition).

From the 2012 NYTimes article on MOOCs:

'Dr. Agarwal predicts that “a year from now, campuses will give credit for people with edX certificates.” He expects students will one day arrive on campus with MOOC credits the way they do now with Advanced Placement.'

Never happened.

'Dr. Stavens promises more change, and more disruption: “We are only 5 to 10 percent of the way there.”'

Turned out we were already 100% of the way there after 24 months of MOOCs being launched.

freddie_mercury commented on Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down pcgamer.com/games/masterc... · Posted by u/croes

giantg2 · 22 days ago

Lots of outrage at the card companies, but strangely, no outrage at the laws that actually caused this. One is the Australian law to remove that type of content and the other is the US law that says the payment processor can't participate in illegal transactions.

freddie_mercury · 22 days ago

Why would there be outrage at laws when the article we're talking about specifically says this isn't about any laws but instead about a Mastercard rule about damaging their brand?