MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shadowgovt | 2025-10-21 18:17:14+00:00
Indeed. That is what I was responding to; if I over-assumed the GP's position, my apologies.

We've been using mechanical, semi-mechanical, and electronic systems for decades at this point. The new concern for accuracy is pretty unfounded (and, it is worth noting, was heavily drum-beat into existence by a Presidential candidate who then went on to win an election).

If we want to talk problems with electronic systems, I'm a lot more concerned about how people don't actually know how to use touch screens (and I am myself in favor of pencil-and-paper ballots for that reason alone) than I am about people being able to sneak a super-double-secret modification to an electronic tabulator in against all the ways that attack could fail (including "The county can just decide to hand-count the pencil and paper ballots anyway, which would discover the deception").

Fully electronic, no-paper-output systems are past my personal trust threshold.
by philips | 2025-10-21 18:17:23+00:00
The comments on this have lots of folks focused purely on the software, talking about a lack of paper ballots, etc. So, let me provide some more context that is missing from the post.

For those who don't know the VotingWorks software is both Open Source and their machines create and count paper ballots. You can read about it here: https://www.voting.works/machines

Essentially they have a computer, a ballot marking device, that people can use to mark their ballot. That ballot is printed on paper. Then the paper can be validated visually. Then fed into a machine to scan and count. The paper ballot is preserved and can be later audited.

The ballot marking device has a number of advantage over pre-printed and hand marked ballots:

- American Disabilities Act (ADA) compliant using standard web technologies

- Available in applicable languages without lots of translated papers on hand

- Errors or typos in ballots can be fixed days before election instead of weeks (due to print shop lead times)

- Better UX for complex races where things like ranked choice, choose three, etc with rules which can cause people to mismark and then have their ballots rejected

- Avoids sloppy/incomplete markings that must be interpreted and judged by counters/auditors

The entire system runs offline. It is open source.

They also have separate open source software for running risk limiting audits using the paper ballots: https://www.voting.works/audits

Disclosure: I am a donor to VotingWorks.
by nine_zeros | 2025-10-21 18:17:40+00:00
> Have you watched any of the videos from January 6th? All I saw were a bunch of clueless morons behaving badly, but not violently, in the capital building while Trump literally told them to go home.

Ok, I will give you evidence that it was violent. But will you change your mind or still try to convince yourself by dancing around the edges?

https://www.reddit.com/r/CringeTikToks/comments/1oasyyt/this...
by EGreg | 2025-10-21 18:17:43+00:00
As a result, a new psychological loop forms:

Every moment I don't spend prompting, I'm falling behind.

The system insidiously guilts you for not leveraging it constantly. Allowing AI to sit there, just waiting, feels like a waste. It's subtle, but corrosive. Any downtime becomes a missed opportunity, and rest turns into inefficiency. Within this framework, leisure becomes a moral failure.

I don't feel that way.

What I feel is that in 2025 we're still the bottleneck because we make decisions. In 2026 we'll automate the QA part, and then we'll be able to fan out and fan in a lot of solutions at scale. Those who remove the bottlenecks in business beat everyone else. Is is why FAMGA and tech companies are the top of wall street. Biggest bang for the buck.
by kyboren | 2025-10-21 18:17:56+00:00
Not sure how you expect to be taken seriously while your personal website is a weeaboo homage to anthropomorphized cartoon ponies.

I can believe that in heavily left-leaning social circles unironically using the term "social justice warrior" is grounds for social excommunication.

I hope you can believe that most people outside those circles--in other words, most people--understand it as a more-or-less neutral descriptive term and won't think twice about it.
by AfterHIA | 2025-10-21 18:18:10+00:00
John Von Neumann famously questioned the value of compilers. Eventually we get the keyboard kids that have dominated computing since the early 70's in some form or another whether in a forward thinking way like Dan Ingalls or in an idealic way like the gcc/Free Software crowd. In parallel to this you have people like Laurel, Sutherland, Nelson who live in lateral thinking land.

The real issue is that we've been in-store for a big paradigm shift in how we interact with computers for decades at this point. SketchPad let us do competent, constraints based mathematics with images. Video games and the Logo language demonstrate the potential for programming using, "kinetics." In the future we won't code with symbols we'll dance our intent into and through the machine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6orsmFndx_o http://www.squeakland.org/tutorials/ https://vimeo.com/27344103
by bigyabai | 2025-10-21 18:18:25+00:00
This is a strawman, the parent is right and nothing you just said detracts from their argument. We can and should encourage both sides to extradite their war criminals and stop the lawless killing that threatens civilians. Attempts to isolate the blame into one ethnic group is antisemitism in its purest form.

It is only possible to reach a lasting peace if both sides are willing. Palestinians are willing - are Israelis? I see the internationally illegal colonies being constructed in the Golan Heights and Hebron and have my doubts.
by reenorap | 2025-10-21 18:18:39+00:00
Opening up the internet to a nuclear facility so that the janitor can watch Youtube seems preposterous. People can afford to do things slower for the sake of security. Having things typed out, verifying security via phone calls, etc like it's the 1970s seems reasonable to me. Does it really matter if things aren't fully optimized for speed and convenience in nuclear facilities?
by Breza | 2025-10-21 18:19:11+00:00
So in 2025, what self-hosted options does a 15 year old have to manage his finances using Bitcoin? Assume he gets a monthly paycheck of 0.00125 BTC. How would his employer pay him? How much would be eaten up by fees?

Back in 2013, I loved the idea of Bitcoin. Then I actually tried using it. Such a pain. I switched to Coinbase until I gave up entirely on crypto around 2017 and became highly skeptical it was going to change the world as promised. I would love to hear that the world of self-custodied Bitcoin has become less onerous.
by svnt | 2025-10-21 18:19:24+00:00
Leopards ate my face is only negative, and has been more political, typically someone voting to weaponize the government against their peer-level enemies but hypocritically, only to later realize they are not a party to the benefits, only the consequences.

It is really about a perceptual flaw in pre-fascist democratic behavior: people believing themselves to be a part of the protected class because they voted for it.

It seems to apply here because someone profiting from the creation of tools used on others by people with money/power has them used on him by the government.

tldr; it is a subset of you reap what you sow, with more specificity and punch
by advisedwang | 2025-10-21 18:19:45+00:00
You are addressing the theoretical hard problem, which even humans struggle with. But the article makes it clear that the AI is failing at even the most basic level of answer:

> Some parties, such as the centre-right CDA, “are almost never mentioned, even when the user’s input exactly matches the positions of one of these parties”

So you could say my beliefs are [CDA platform], which party best represents that, and the bots are responding with teh PVV.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-10-21 18:19:50+00:00
The person shopping at Costco or choosing a cheaper roof installer who can work more efficiently with fewer humans is doing the same thing - “classifying humans as a cost”.

Choosing to clean your own house instead of hiring a house cleaner, cooking your own food, doing your own landscaping, driving your own car, all of these are “classifying humans as a cost”.

I probably could afford a maid and landscaper, but I don’t because I would rather keep the money. When an employer does that, it is somehow different.
by EGreg | 2025-10-21 18:19:56+00:00
One would think that machines and automation would be the perfect thing to catch bugs.

We already do that on many levels -- compilers, linters, pre-commit hooks etc. Well, AI can just red-team and create new tests. The great thing about red-teaming vs blue teaming is that false positive and hallucinations don't hurt the final product. So you can let it go wild.
by incomingpain | 2025-10-21 18:20:38+00:00
There are multiple new start ups and existing competition that's impacting them. They are facing competition.

The curious thing is that big LLM folks put together RAG systems which act much like wikipedia. But it's more than that. They built dictionaries, book repos(borderline illegal), news repos, and data knowledge base. These are bigger than wikipedia. Better because you dont have anonymous partisans.

Wikipedia is at a point where they have purged multiple perspectives and it has left an unreliable systemic bias in wikipedia. They are dealing with this problem and competitors are popping up because of these problems.

Larry put out his theses on his user page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Nine_Theses

Originally being heavily censored, vandalized, and deleted. It does seem to have been allowed, despite it being in user space.

Every one of those theses is correct.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-10-21 18:20:40+00:00
> If the history of the world since the Industrial Revolution can teach anything, it is that while the machines took much of the work, they did not shorten the workday

I guess you missed the part where people worked 7 days a week and 10 hours per day, and we didn't have ~20% of the population retired.

Unless we break social contracts, in 30 years ~40% of the population will be retired in large parts of The West and China.

If you're still working 40 hours a week, doing basically nothing but posting on HN, going to the gym, having lunch for hour+ breaks, for most of the work day - you might think nothing has changed.

But for 10-20% more of the population to not be working, there's a huge number of hours that aren't being worked.

It's just that most of the gains are going to one group of people.

Most of us will be in that group by that time...
by lovich | 2025-10-21 18:21:00+00:00
> I think individuals who get comfortable in their jobs don’t like automation arriving at their station because it upends the order of things just as they were feeling comfortable and stable. Being adaptable now is more important than ever.

Look at all the other threads with people’s experiences. They aren’t unhappy with automation because they were comfortable. They are unhappy with automation because the reward for being more productive is higher expectations and no compensation.

People think the Luddite movement was smashing looms because they inherently hated technology. They smashed the looms because the factories were producing more and the result of that productivity was the workers becoming destitute.

If the machines and progress only bring about a worse life for individuals, those individuals are going to be against the machines
by AfterHIA | 2025-10-21 18:21:09+00:00
It might be an aside but it would be, "really groovy" if the general public started to realize that, "democracy" is a way of life and a set of considerations that furthers an open public discourse and attempts to maximize human felicity and reduce cruelty. In an oxymoronic sense it's the public voting on things that actually kills real democracy.

https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Courses/Antirepresentationa...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Theory_of_Justice
by throw_me_uwu | 2025-10-21 18:21:31+00:00
Because ML infra is bloatware beyond belief.

If it was engineered right, it would take:

- transfer model weights from NVMe drive/RAM to GPU via PCIe

- upload tiny precompiled code to GPU

- run it with tiny CPU host code

But what you get instead is gigabytes of PyTorch + Nvidia docker container bloatware (hi Nvidia NeMo) that takes forever to start.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-10-21 18:21:37+00:00
Full disclosure: I am old.

When I started programming for Corporate™ back 1995, it was a wildly different career than what it has become. Say what you want about the lunatics running the asylum, but we liked it that way. Engineering knew their audience, knew the tech stack, knew what was going on in "the industry", ultimately called the shots.

Your code was your private sandbox. Want to rewrite it every other release? Go for it. Like to put your curly braces on a new line? Like TABs (good for you)? Go for it. It's your code, you own it. (You break it, you fix it.)

No unit tests (we called that parameter checking). No code reviews (well, nothing formal — often, time was spent in co-workers offices talking over approaches, white-boarding API… Often if a bug was discovered or known, you just fixed it. There may have been a formal process beginning, but to the lunatics, that was optional.

You can imagine how management felt — having to essentially just trust the devs to deliver.

In the end management won, of course.

When I am asked if I am sorry that I left Apple, I have to tell people, no. I miss working at Apple in the 90's, but that Apple was never coming back. And I hate to say it, but I suspect the industry itself will never return to those "cowboy coding" days. It was fun while it lasted.
by alwa | 2025-10-21 18:21:42+00:00
I was gratified by the last little tidbit: a nod to the Ohio “tinkerer” whose 2019 experiment in home automation interfered with neighbors’ 315MHz-band devices to the point that the power company shut off the whole block in an attempt to isolate the interference

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/04/us/key-fobs-north-olmsted...

(https://archive.is/aTWZ2)

Apparently the regulations work well enough to provoke an official response when garage door openers stop working over the area of a few houses… a level of reliability I’d long taken for granted
by VladVladikoff | 2025-10-21 18:21:43+00:00
Every time I need to touch anything made my Microsoft lately I am met with multiple levels of glitchyness, straight up bugs, most frustratingly it’s so excruciatingly slow.

Recently I tried to configure a new subdomain to handle mail on 365 and even finding their DKIM configuration section was a mission. Once finding it, I learned that their DNS check fails to properly handle subdomains for email, so you have to put their DKIM keys against your root domain. Genius!
by nine_zeros | 2025-10-21 18:22:04+00:00
Lots of wrong assumptions.

- If you think the other side isn't armed, you are foolish.

- The number of deaths doesn't define a failed coup attempt.

- The accusations are not accusations once you see the violence: https://www.reddit.com/r/CringeTikToks/comments/1oasyyt/this...

The only reason this coup attempt looks comical is because it was unplanned and led by Trump who is incompetent. It could have easily turned even worse - more deaths, more congress people running around, a traitor VP etc. Mike Pence truly saved the country by breaking ranks with Republicans.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-10-21 18:22:16+00:00
Roomba redux[1]. Seems ill advised to have appliances that cannot function when offline and reminded me of push back I got at Google for telling them offline maps were essential (in spite of the product manager insisting "everyone has internet everywhere, and where it isn't at the moment it will be by next year.")

Unrelated: That entire article and illustrations are all gen-AI. yuck.

[1] https://fntalk.com/tech/dead-roombas-stranded-packages-and-d...
by alganet | 2025-10-21 18:22:28+00:00
I believe this sentiment to be a mistake.

The IT world is waiting for a revolution. Only in order to blame that revolution for the mistakes of a few powerful people.

I would not be surprised if all this revolutionary sentiment is manufactured. That thing about "Luddites" (not a thing that will stick by the way), this nostalgic stuff, all of it.

We need to be much smarter than that and not fall for such obvious traps.

An identity is a target on your back. We don't need one. We don't need to unite to a cause, we're already amongst one of the most united kinds of workers there is, and we don't need a galvanizing identity to do it.
by gnabgib | 2025-10-21 18:22:41+00:00
Not the title, not an Open AI product (this is produced by Every: https://every.to/team).

The Open AI browser is called "ChatGPT Atlas" (https://chatgpt.com/atlas) - related discussion (286 points, 310 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45658479
by JohnMakin | 2025-10-21 18:22:57+00:00
I've had jobs with 70-80 hour weeks I genuinely loved, and jobs that required maybe 4-8 hours a week of actual time devoted to it that burnt me out. Burnout is a lot more complicated than the sheer number of hours worked - if you are deriving meaningful value from such a schedule, and feel what you are doing is worthwhile, and you feel valued and compensated accordingly - you're not likely to mind that much. The issue of course is that this is rarely the case, and plenty of studies have shown there are severe diminishing returns to working past 50 hours in a week in knowledge work that I doubt AI is going to really help with that much.
by dancerofaran | 2025-10-21 18:22:59+00:00
Does anyone actually look at evidence anymore or do they just look at the twitter ramblings of YC founders thinking this models reality?

Founders have been doing stupid signalling for ages to seem like they are more worthy of VC funding. A single anecdote in a podcast about a badly written Wired article based on a few anecdotes from hustle culture founders does not make something true.

Working 80 hour weeks for low pay and high expected upside has ALWAYS been SV software culture.

The individual leverage of an experienced software developer has never been higher.
by furyofantares | 2025-10-21 18:23:03+00:00
Ignoring LLMs for a second, some code I write is done in sort of full-craft full-diligence mode, where I am only committing something where I am very proud of it's structure and of every line of code. I know it inside and out, I have reasons for every decision, major or minor, and I don't know of any ways to make it better. Not only is the code excellent, I've also produced a person (me) who is an expert in that code.

Most code is not like that. Most code I want to get something done, and so I achieve something quite a bit below that bar. But some things I get to write in that way, and it is very rewarding to do so. It's my favorite code to write by a mile.

Back to LLMs - I find it is both easier than ever and harder than ever to write code in that mode. Easier than ever because, if I can actually get and stay in that mode psychologically, I can get the result I want faster, and the bar is higher. Even though I am able to write MUCH better code than an LLM is, I can write even better code with LLM assistance.

But it is harder than ever to get into that mode and stay in that mode. It is so easy to just skim LLM-generated code, and it looks good and it works. But it's bad code, maybe just a little bit at first, but it gets worse and worse the more you let through. Heck, sometimes it just starts out as not-excellent code, but every time you accept it without enough diligence the next output is worse. And by the time you notice it's often too late, you've slopped yourself, while also failing to produce an expert in the code that's been written.
by Telaneo | 2025-10-21 18:23:03+00:00
With more and more workplaces constantly running on skeleton crews as that's cheaper, with a correspondingly higher amount of workplace disasters happening due to lack of maintenance, I can't say I blame them. Especially if there's no reward for going above and beyond, since their boss just wants above and beyond to become the new norm. Not their fault their boss didn't hire enough people.
by saulpw | 2025-10-21 18:23:05+00:00
I agree with paper ballots, completely. But requiring voting to be in-person: how do you deal with citizens who are homebound, traveling, or working? Not literally everyone can get the day off--even if you suggest "shifts", there will be some people who won't be able to, whether because the hospital is understaffed and people will literally die, or because they don't have the resources to get to the voting hall on their lunch break.
by Legend2440 | 2025-10-21 18:23:13+00:00
This is also a strength. Formal languages struggle to work with concepts that cannot be precisely defined, which are especially common in the physical world.

e.g. it is difficult to write a traditional program to wash dishes, because how do you formally define a dish? You can only show examples of dishes and not-dishes. This is where informal language and neural networks shine.
by SpecialistK | 2025-10-21 18:23:17+00:00
I truly believe it's 75% the name. If the changes in W11 (Electron Start button, tabbed File Explorer, new context menu, etc.) were just included over a few semi-annual channel Windows 10 updates then the push back would be a lot less. All of the most annoying stuff, like telemetry and Copilot advertisements were part of the latest Windows 10 releases anyway.

The hardware support is also a big issue, but I don't know how many people complaining so vocally don't have computers new enough to run without any kind of bypass.
by doso | 2025-10-21 18:23:28+00:00
Something's bugging me about Atlas - it's clearly Chromium-based (you can tell from the user agent and UI), but I can't find any credit to Chromium anywhere. No license info, no acknowledgments, and when I try to access chrome:// pages they're blocked.

Maybe I'm overthinking this, but shouldn't there be some transparency about what you're building on top of? Especially with open source projects that have attribution requirements? I get that it's still early days, but this feels like a pretty basic thing to get right.

Anyone else notice this or know if this is standard practice? Just seems odd to me that they're not being upfront about the foundation they're building on.