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A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months
291–300 of 311 posts
Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you please stop posting ragey comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. It's not okay to assert that anyone “deserves a bullet in the head” here, for any reason. In the case in question, clearly the system, and multiple people within it, failed to notice the issue. On HN we expect people to be thoughtful and curious, and ”…
Tom, you live in a democratic country where the death penalty is codified in law as a legitimate punishment for certain crimes. What is it in the guidelines that should keep me from arguing in favour of expanding the scope of such penalties to also cover other, perhaps more harmful behaviour? > is a barbaric, medieval reaction to a modern scenario. You are inherently calling US voters at large barbarians and medieval…
Please don’t make assumptions about where I’m a citizen, voter or resident. Even if you're right it’s irrelevant.
The guidelines require us to converse curiously, to be kind, and to avoid ideological battle and flamebait. To write “A judge making a “mistake” like this deserves a bullet in the head, nothing less” is obviously in breach of all those expectations.
If you want to mount a case for ways judges and other actors in the legal system should be held accountable for errors that lead to illegitimate convictions, sure, you can do so thoughtfully. This isn’t difficult.
Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
But in a trial room, that evidence was 100% there: > Prosecution: Mister Klayme, the criminal messages were sent from a Kik username called "fus ro dah". What's your Kik username? > Klayme: It's "fus ro dah". > Prosecution: It logically follows that Mister Klayme was the sender, and is therefore guilty of the offense.
And the reasonable doubt would come from someone else could have used my account, does the service's account ID match the account ID for my user name, nothing was found on my devices, did the IPs match my known IPs, when did the access take place vs where was I, etc.
But that is all speculation/opinion/non-first hand knowledge, you can't actually say any of those things in court without an expert witness. Only expert witnesses can testify to things that they didn't witness themselves, lawyers and lay witnesses cannot.
Also don't think you can simply get the opposing expert witness to give this kind of testimony on cross examination. During cross examination you can only ask them about things they testified to during direct (and a few other things such as their qualifications). So if they never testified anything about your IP during direct then you can't ask them about whether or not your IP matched during cross.
If you don't have the money to pay for an expert witness then you better just hope that the jury already knows about IP addresses and actually realizes that IP addresses matching was never brought up during the trial (they won't btw, the general public knows nothing about these things).
Think about it this way, all this techno mumbo-jumbo about account IDs and IP addresses may as well be black magic as far as the jury and court is concerned. So only a verified expert witness can testify about them. If we allowed otherwise then every trial would be nothing but testimony about how various magical or religious principles mean that you can't possibly be guilty (or vice versa).
Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which LLM? When was this code written? When was the last time you saw "garbled output" and what was the context? I'm really trying to get to the bottom of these claims, because I see them a lot and it's so wildly different from most people's experiences.
If a lot of people make the same claim, then from their perspective, you’re the one with a “wildly different” experience. What makes you so certain your experience generalizes to “most people’s experiences”?
Well, I'm either a god with prompts or...
Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just today I had an incident review meeting resulting from a prod incident where the root cause was an LLM refactor stripping ! from the front of a boolean statement "for no reason". Not to mention how often I've seen garbled output from the LLM. Lots of things failed for that to reach prod, but the assertion that LLMs do not make subtle typos... is not congruent with my experience.
Which LLM? When was this code written? When was the last time you saw "garbled output" and what was the context? I'm really trying to get to the bottom of these claims, because I see them a lot and it's so wildly different from most people's experiences.
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Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
Insane. An LLM is just as likely to hallucinate a missing/extra underscore and ping the wrong person. A machine cannot be held accountable.
What's insane is that people say things like this in 2026. I suspect it stems from being retired and not really using LLMs for work, and instead using them for leisure, and therefore not knowing that they're extremely capable for logical operations, much more than they are for entertainment. Your second point about "machine cannot be held accountable" is a non sequitur, so I'll leave it.
mate I wish I could retire from this hellscape.
Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tom, you live in a democratic country where the death penalty is codified in law as a legitimate punishment for certain crimes. What is it in the guidelines that should keep me from arguing in favour of expanding the scope of such penalties to also cover other, perhaps more harmful behaviour? > is a barbaric, medieval reaction to a modern scenario. You are inherently calling US voters at large barbarians and medieval…
Please don’t make assumptions about where I’m a citizen, voter or resident. Even if you're right it’s irrelevant. The guidelines require us to converse curiously, to be kind, and to avoid ideological battle and flamebait. To write “A judge making a “mistake” like this deserves a bullet in the head, nothing less” is obviously in breach of all those expectations. If you want to mount a case for ways judges and other ac…
You publicly work for a SF based company, the first google result for Tom Howard Ycombinator is a public profile maintained by you which claims that you are based in San Francisco.
It's also noteworthy that you choose to live in one of the 27 states that still has the death penalty.
>Even if you're right it’s irrelevant
I think you made it relevant with personal attacks like "barbaric". There's really nothing wrong with me calling out your hypocricy, given that you presumably pay quite a bit of taxes to a government that uses some of them to carry out legal and illegal executions.
I bet your tax dollars have killed far more innocent people than mine have, so if I'm barbaric, what does that make you? Or is this simply a case of words being less palatable than the actions, where talking about the killing is viewed as worse than the actual killing?
If you honestly considered the death penalty barbaric, you would presumably not be working for a California-based company. Otherwise your objection seems rather performative, especially for a rich man who could easily relocate.
>If you want to mount a case for ways judges and other actors in the legal system should be held accountable for errors that lead to illegitimate convictions, sure, you can do so thoughtfully. This isn’t difficult.
This is simply not a case where the specific details leave much room for thoughtful analysis, I suspect that if you take the time to actually read and reflect on the courts decision you will perhaps see my comment in a different light.
As indicated by the scare quotes, this clearly wasn't a mistake. The judge repeatedly claims things that were not in the evidence presented to him, his misconduct has absolutely nothing to do with the typo that may have mislead the police and prosecutors. This judge made a deliberate decision to not do his job.
Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it weird? It's often much faster to re-type a short identifier than to select, copy and paste it.
They’re talking about likelihood of a typo, not speed.
Well I guess hyper-focusing only on some motivations that affect the situation can make you confused about why others do certain things.
Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can’t leave is hanging like that! What happened?
There are a gazillion federal prosecutions in the US that go something like 1) Pile of evidence that someone is guilty. 2) Federal "expert witness" allowed and funded to testify it points to X person 3) Defense is broke 4) If defense not broke, judge finds reason why defense expert witness can't present their full argument 5) Prosecution offers plea deal or a gazillion years in jail 6) Person folds when they realize…
I can't imagine a basic analysis of the Kik account would require a terribly expensive expert, in theory.
Could the solution be to turn lots of local IT / programmers into potential experts to bend down the cost curve?
Re: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don’t make assumptions about where I’m a citizen, voter or resident. Even if you're right it’s irrelevant. The guidelines require us to converse curiously, to be kind, and to avoid ideological battle and flamebait. To write “A judge making a “mistake” like this deserves a bullet in the head, nothing less” is obviously in breach of all those expectations. If you want to mount a case for ways judges and other ac…
You publicly work for a SF based company, the first google result for Tom Howard Ycombinator is a public profile maintained by you which claims that you are based in San Francisco. It's also noteworthy that you choose to live in one of the 27 states that still has the death penalty. >Even if you're right it’s irrelevant I think you made it relevant with personal attacks like "barbaric". There's really nothing wrong w…
This is an unhinged ad hominem attack and none of it changes whether the original comment breached the guidelines.
Idealizing killing of people is never okay on HN and we've been consistent about that for as long as I can remember.
Even if your ad hom attack was relevant: where my LinkedIn says I am based says nothing about how many people my “tax dollars have killed” or what I personally support. Digging up limited available public information about someone then making these kinds of assumptions, extrapolations and value-judgments about their level of wealth, career/life decisions and options, and political views is utterly vile. Don't ever do this again on HN; if you did this kind of thing to anyone who wasn't a moderator, the account would be immediately banned.
The facts available in the linked story indicate that there were failures at every level in the system: two teams of investigators, the prosecutors, the defense and the judge. If you have a substantive argument about how to address this kind of failure, you can make it in accordance with the guidelines.
The guidelines exist entirely so that substantive arguments can have the very best chance of being expressed and heard. Trawling through someone's limited online footprint to handwave up a whole lot of irrelevant material only indicates you don't have a strong point to make. Everyone knows that ad hominem is what you do when you don't have a strong argument to rely on, and this is about as bad as ad hom ever gets.
If your style of discourse is to declare that another human “deserves a bullet in the head”, this is not the place for you. My goodness.