MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by whimsicalism | 2025-10-14 21:09:44+00:00
I think it is obviously on topic for this article specifically highlighting this problem and doubt I'm being downvoted due to some neutral criterion separating 'machine' from 'policy'.

> See, the SAVE Act got a lot of attention in the media because it will take away eligible Americans’ ability to vote because it requires in-person registration with specific documentary proof of citizenship (like a passport or State ID + birth certificate) that millions of citizens lack. State ID alone is not enough. 47 states don’t print “U.S. citizen” anywhere on them.
by martinvonz | 2025-10-14 21:10:00+00:00
FWIW, Drew DeVault wrote such an article but he later took it down (in protest of the Google CLA, I think). You can probably still find it somewhere.

> Since you're a git expert, you understand the underlying mechanics of your tool and you can explain to me why a command like Git rebase is better in JJ than in git.

I'm not the person you asked but I can try to explain (I started the jj project, fwiw). Some things `jj rebase` does better than `git rebase`:

* It rebases whole trees/graphs of commits. This is the scenario described at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17315285/rebasing-a-tree.... Bookmarks/branches are always updated accordingly. `git rebase --update-refs` can do that these days, but still only for one range of commits at a time (i.e. one leaf commit).

* It lets you rip out some commits of a stack and put them somewhere else. This is the `-r` flag. See https://jj-vcs.github.io/jj/latest/cli-reference/#jj-rebase for some examples. You can also reorder commits by doing things like `jj rebase -r X::Y --insert-after Z` to insert the range of commits from X though Y after commit Z. You can parallelize parts of the graph by doing e.g. `jj rebase -r C --insert-after A --insert-before D` to take an initial linear graph A..D and make C parallel to B.

* It doesn't stop when there are conflicts. You can instead resolve the conflicts when you feel like it.

* It's able to rebase merge commits well, even if there are conflicts and/or conflict resolutions in them. `git rebase --rebase-merges` with the "ort" merge strategy and rerere enabled gets close these days.

* It's about 100x faster by not touching the working copy unnecessarily. `git replay` also does that.

I just sent https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/pull/7733 to provide some more detail in our "Git Comparison" doc.
by Animats | 2025-10-14 21:10:01+00:00
From the article:

"One in four students today is chronically absent, meaning that they miss more than a tenth of instructional days, a substantial increase from pre-pandemic averages. ... Roughly 40 percent of middle-school teachers work in schools where there are no late penalties for coursework, no zeroes for missing coursework, and unlimited redos of tests."

That alone may explain the declines in at the bottom. "80% of success is showing up", as Woody Allen once said.
by thaw13579 | 2025-10-14 21:10:03+00:00
It would be great to have a similar analysis for elementary school-aged children. Many schools are using "crisis simulation" of active shooter events in an effort to prepare for them (and presumably reduce the risk of death). While good natured, I think it's ultimately just needlessly traumatizing children, since school shootings account for <0.1% of deaths. While school shootings are devastating and sadly on the rise, the media greatly exaggerates the risks in people's minds. By the numbers, the biggest mortality risks for children are drowning and automobile injuries while unbuckled, both of which can be trained without inflicting psychological harm.
by borkod | 2025-10-14 21:10:11+00:00
As a Type 1 diabetic, I need to continuously monitor my blood glucose levels. So I built a VS code extension that displays my blood glucose level in the status bar. This VS code extension is for those that use the Dexcom CGM sensors. The extension connects to Dexcom web services to retrieve the latest blood glucose readings. The latest readings are displayed in VS Code status bar. If you are or know any software engineers living with diabetes, this tool might be helpful.

Completely free and open source.

VS Code Extension Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=borkod.d...

If you use Freestyle Libre CGM or Nightscout, you may be interested in one of these VS Code extensions I've previously built:

LibreLinkUp Status Bar Extension: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=borkod.l...

Nightscout Status Bar Extension: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=borkod.n...
by efitz | 2025-10-14 21:10:14+00:00
Two thoughts:

1. It is crazy that we are using machines in any way in the voting process.

2. Which is it? The MAGA people tried many lawsuits and many appeals to voting authorities for investigations. The unanimous response “safest election ever”. Ok fine, then no one should have a problem with whoever owns the voting machines, because there’s so little risk, only crazy people would even ask for investigation.

Which is it?

Ofc there is a problem with a single company or organization controlling a nontrivial segment of the voting machines used in the US. And ofc it was a problem in 2020 as well. The solution is to get easy-to-tamper-but-hard-to-detect stuff out of the voting process. Pen and paper and video recorded hand counts in front of witnesses. Same night results. It is not rocket science and most of the rest of the world does it this way.
by panny | 2025-10-14 21:10:24+00:00
My favorite paragraph in the article:

The experience of a few outlier states gives reason for optimism. Matthew Chingos and Kristin Blagg, two scholars at the Urban Institute, computed “demographically adjusted NAEP scores,” examining how effective states are at educating kids after accounting for significant differences in socioeconomic status. Their analysis of the 2024 NAEP results found that Mississippi was best at educating kids in fourth-grade math, fourth-grade reading, and eighth-grade math. (In 2013, Mississippi was at the bottom of the unadjusted league table.) When I computed the correlation between these demographically adjusted scores and state spending, I found that there was none. If you’re an underprivileged kid in America, you will, on average, get the best education not in rich Massachusetts but in poor Mississippi, where per-pupil spending is half as high.
by _bent | 2025-10-14 21:10:30+00:00
CachyOS is also an Arch based distro with a GUI installer including multiple desktop options, such as Gnome, KDE Plasma, but also preconfigured Hyprland or Niri with a Waybar, Alacritty and a spotlight-esque application launcher.

I'm currently dual booting Windows & CachyOS with Niri and installation was incredibly smooth, including setting up secure boot or playing Windows games.

https://cachyos.org/
by heavyset_go | 2025-10-14 21:11:03+00:00
> They’re a corporation with explicit goal of making money. They’re not interested in assisting LE beyond minimum legal requirements.

Having a good relation with LE and the state is beneficial to companies, it puts them in a good position to sell them services, get preferential treatment, quid pro quo, etc.

Look at how Google, Microsoft, Amazon etc cozied up to LE and the government. They get billion dollar contracts, partnerships with LE and the more they cooperate willingly, the less likely they'll be sued into cooperation or punished with loss of contracts.
by ekr____ | 2025-10-14 21:11:57+00:00
This is less about technology than it is about process. Specifically:

1. California allows mail in ballots to be counted if they arrive up to 7 days after the election. 2. California requires a 1% manual tally. This can take a really long time in a big jurisdiction like LA.

Note that this doesn't mean you don't know the likely answer relatively quickly. The 5 weeks is about how long it takes to have a certified result.
by parsimo2010 | 2025-10-14 21:12:24+00:00
I think you might both be right- the author may be thinking of lower cost MCUs only aiming for tolerable ADC performance, while you might be thinking of all MCUs, even higher cost.

The RP2350 has 9.2 ENOB on a 12 bit ADC. Sure, you might be able to decimate multiple samples to get more bits out of them, but the spec sheet supports the author's claim (https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/pico-sdk/hardware....). There are even lower cost MCUs like the CH32V003 that have even worse ADC performance.

On the other hand, some MCUs can definitely do 10+ bits, such as the STM32H7 line which gets 13+ ENOB from a 16 bit ADC. This is impressive, but the H7 MCUs are literally an order of magnitude more expensive than the RP2350, so they might not be something the author tinkers with much. https://www.st.com/resource/en/application_note/dm00628458-g...
by greggoB | 2025-10-14 21:12:24+00:00
> Biden was indeed president when America withdrew. Obviously. Unsure if you’re trolling. I guess so.

So they were both responsible - my (non-trolling) point.

> So, yes, it was trump who was responsible for the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan.

Also of interest is how he (trump) decided it should be done, and what ramifications this would have for how badly it would go. This is also covered in the video ;)
by russellbeattie | 2025-10-14 21:12:27+00:00
Earlier in the year I was watching yet another series about a British mob. There were so many murders on the show, I wondered how many actual homicides there are in the UK every year.

Looking it up, there are around 500 homicides each year in England and Wales, and around 30 of them involve guns. In 2023 there were 22 gun deaths total. (For comparison, in the same year the US had 46,700).

Now compare that to the number of shows broadcast every day in the UK that have murders. I think a single BBC murder mystery show has more deaths than the entirety of the country, let alone a single Guy Ritchie film.

It's not just the news media which warps people's perceptions. I bet the same survey in the UK would be similarly skewed.

This has been a thing since forever. I remember in the 80s the complaints about violence in media. That's not going to change. And sensationalist headlines have been part of news since its first inception.

What really needs to change is the education system so that people are able to differentiate reality from media, news and video games.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-14 21:13:01+00:00
> Why have grades at all? Instead, have a directed graph of skills that you need to advance through

FTA: "Elements of so-called equitable grading, which is supposed to be more resistant to bias than traditional grading, have taken off in American schools. Roughly 40 percent of middle-school teachers work in schools where there are no late penalties for coursework, no zeroes for missing coursework, and unlimited redos of tests."

> It would remove the stigma of "being held back", as there are no levels in a strict sense, just cumulative progress

These students do worse. Absent a challenge, you get the pedagogical equivalent of button mashing. Evaluation is a necessary component of progress. It seems that if the evaluation is stripped of consequence, it ceases to evaluate.
by theshrike79 | 2025-10-14 21:13:02+00:00
I've used this analogy many times:

Codex + GPT-5-high is an offshore consultant. You give it the spec and it'll do the work and come back with something.

Claude is built like a pair programmer, it chats while it works and you can easily interrupt it without breaking the flow.

Codex is clearly more thorough, it's _excellent_ at picking apart Sonnet 4.5 code and finding the subtle gotchas it leaves behind when it just plows to a result.

And like you said, Claude is results first. It'll get where you want it to go, even if it has to mock the whole application to get the tests to pass. =)
by ushakov | 2025-10-14 21:13:18+00:00
thanks for explaining, especially the runtimes part!

i am currently running Docker MCP Containers + MCP Gateway mixed with Remote MCPs in microVMs (aka. Sandboxes).

seems to be the most portable setup, so you don't have to worry about dealing with different exec like uvx, poetry, bun, npx and the whole stdio/streamable http conversion.

lambdas sound interesting, esp. if you have figured out the way to make stateful work stateless, but comes with the downside that you have to maintain all the integrations yourself + the environment itself might have compatibility issues. i've seen someone also using cloudflare dynamic workers for similar use-case (disco.dev), but they're maintaining all the integrations by hand (or with Claude Code rather). more extreme version of this would be writing custom integration specific to the user by following very strict prompt.

anyways, i'll look into Metorial as am curious about how the portable runtimes work.

i am also maintaining a list of MCP gateways, just added you there as well: https://github.com/e2b-dev/awesome-mcp-gateways

thanks for building this, looking forward to checking it out!
by echelon | 2025-10-14 21:13:18+00:00
Scantrons are subject to voter error, confusion, mis-labeling. They're almost as bad as punch-ballot.

The state of Georgia finally has the perfect voting machine setup after many years of "hackable" digital-only voting machines:

- Voters are given a signed, electronic card to make choices at a voting booth (same as before, in the suspicious "hackable" era).

- As of 2020, after you make your elections, you receive a full-page paper printout which records your choices on A4-sized paper. This is your ballot. The names of your choices are clearly visible so you can physically review all of your votes in a large, easy to read font. All of it is crisply printed with no "hanging chads", misprinting, or under-inked results. There's only one page.

- The paper ballots also have a large QR code that can easily be machine-read, but the human-readable portions are permanently linked with the QR code for later auditing.

- You scan and deposit your paper ballot and card together in a secure lock box that cannot be opened without key.

This system feels perfect.
by musha68k | 2025-10-14 21:13:26+00:00
Aside from cryptographically sound and open source end to end verifiable options there is one simple alternative still used in many other countries and jurisdictions:

1. voters mark paper ballots 2. observers from all parties watch the counting 3. results are tallied publicly

Yes, this is very much feasible; and no, this is not the right domain to be ingeniously efficient and cost sensitive. US being the richest country in the world or some such, etc..
by timr | 2025-10-14 21:13:57+00:00
> A HUGE amount of the population in my quickly-regressing country don't believe that COVID was the killer that it in fact was.

I don't know what country you're referring to, but there's ample data that it's highly partisan in the USA, and you, too, might be misinformed. In particular, the political left wildly overestimates the lethality of Covid (both historically and in the present). See, for example [1]. Other sources [2,3] reporting on the same data also validate the overall partisanship, but unfortunately don't show the correct answer in a way that makes it easy to see the pattern.

[1] https://www.allsides.com/blog/partisan-divide-among-republic...

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-misinformation-is-dis...

[3] https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat...
by simonw | 2025-10-14 21:14:36+00:00
SQLite against S3 can work with some clever tricks. The neatest version of that I've seen is still this WebAssembly one: https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2021/hosting-sqlite-database...

I also got sqlite-s3vfs working from Python a few months ago: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/7/sqlite-s3vfs/

Both of these are very much read-only mechanisms though.
by chasing0entropy | 2025-10-14 21:14:36+00:00
The cumulative effect of a decade of security updates has done nothing to bolster the security of windows 10 and the forced modular updates and required online registration for windows 11 will not offer any significant improvement in security for windows 11.

Until browsers stop supporting windows 10 the threat to a typical business PC user is so small it isn't worth considering.
by thelastgallon | 2025-10-14 21:14:41+00:00
Everything is scalable because for an enterprising executive/manager/employee the most important thing they are trying to solve is scaling their empire. Pay is based on how many reports you have and how big is your budget. Instead of 2 x 20K beefy servers, you get to spend tens or hundreds of million on cloud spend, then dozens of $500K/year SRE/DevOps/Cloud 'experts' running multi-cloud hybrid running kubernetes thingies. There will be SO many internal automation tools and big bonuses for developing those tools (wins all around), yet more and more hiring!

Once other executives understand that you can scale your team massively, they will hire you to scale even greater heights! More #winning!

There is a human element of everything and perverse incentives. Understanding these explains most things that seem baffling at first.
by deadbabe | 2025-10-14 21:15:10+00:00
I doubt it. Newer state of the art models might be a little better, but not enough to justify paying $1000/month for the average person or employee.

If you can get a GPT5 level AI, locally and privately, for just the cost of electricity, why would you bother with anything else? If it can’t do something, you’d just outsource that one prompt to a cloud based AI.

The vast majority of your prompts will be passing through a local LLM first in 2035, and you might rarely need to touch an agent API. So what does that mean for the AI industry?
by wkat4242 | 2025-10-14 21:15:15+00:00
For novice users there's already other more opinionated environments anyway. I get KDE because it's powerful not because I want my grandma to use it.

In fact I don't understand why people are rooting for Linux on the desktop. I personally don't even want that to happen because it would quickly become so dumbed down and commercialised that it would become the same trash that is windows and mac. Because normal users just want to pay someone to take care of things for them and that someone will want to make ever more money. Meaning app stores, services, lock-in, advertising and such crap. So what you get is basically like ChromeOS. Easy mode for users, totally locked in to their warm and fuzzy walled garden, total corporate surveillance and completely evil to power users like you and me.

I'm very happy if the majority of consumers stays away because their wants and needs are completely opposite to ours. All the things that make Linux great will not apply to whatever they will use.
Show HN: PlayMyMood – Generate YouTube Music playlists based on your mood
by speeq | 2025-10-14 21:15:35+00:00
I vibe-coded PlayMyMood, a simple web app that creates a YouTube playlist based on how you feel.

Type a mood (like “nostalgic but hopeful” or “I feel like dancing”), and it generates songs that match.

Try it here: https://playmymood.com/

Have fun!
by jMyles | 2025-10-14 21:16:06+00:00
A simple, interesting, and too-often-unspoken answer is that LLMs, especially with 100k+ context heaps, seem to be better at tasks that have contextual significance and scenery than they are at following one-off instructions.

Or at least, that's very much the experience of my team.

Like everyone else, I'm working on an MCP server right now. Mine though, is designed to populate a new context window with memories of Billy Strings shows and other bluegrass phenomena. Why? Well, in addition to that content being interesting to me and my wanting to see what LLMs have to say about it, I also notice that having this context seems to make them much better at solving bluegrass-adjacent problems in software, which is what I'm working on.
by Waterluvian | 2025-10-14 21:16:17+00:00
It can vary but it’s usually even lower tech. Federal elections are all counted by hand and do not use OCR. I’m not actually sure most provinces use OCR either. It would be the exception, if it’s used at all. When I worked at Elections Ontario it was not OCR.

I think the main thing is that we have one federal, one provincial, and one municipal election per 4ish years (give or take…). And these are generally voting for one race.

American elections can have dozens of different races/questions. This causes them to depend on technology to count, as a full hand count is too impractical for that many different votes.
by bodiekane | 2025-10-14 21:16:19+00:00
Texas has "Robinhood" rules where property taxes from affluent areas are taken away and given to lower income areas throughout the state, so that the schools have more similar budgets regardless of income level in the area.

They still have drastically different quality of schools and student experiences though, because the kids are coming from very different home environments, parental expectations, cultural norms, etc.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-10-14 21:16:42+00:00
> My opinions are not opinions — these are facts

Would you mind explaining why you think it is subjectively wrong to call the MAGA movement fascist? There's a definition of fascism in this thread which is my working definition. Could you read it and provide your perspective on why you think it does not apply in this case? Or perhaps you'd be willing to explain why you think it is a false definition?

The reason I ask is that, by that definition, it seems rather obvious that it is a matter of fact, not opinion, that "US politics has been pretty fascist lately" but you seem to believe it's the other way around.
by cogman10 | 2025-10-14 21:16:43+00:00
> It is crazy that we are using machines in any way in the voting process.

I disagree. My state uses paper ballots and scantrons which I think is exactly the right mix of machine in the process. A hand recount can be pulled off pretty easily (Which, IMO, you probably want some sort of machine involved there too to hold the tally. Even if it's just a txt file).

What's crazy is the extreme side of the machine in the process, where the machine is opaquely keeping track of who voted how.
by baq | 2025-10-14 21:16:58+00:00
It's possible, circular financing is definitely fishy, but OTOH every openai deal sama makes is swallowed by willing buyers at a fair market price. We'll be in a bubble when all the bears are dead and everyone accepts 'a new paradigm', not before; there's plenty of upside capitulation left judging by some hedge fund returns this year.

...and again, this is assuming AI capability stops growing exponentially in the widest possible sense (today, 50%-task-completion time horizon doubles ~7 months).
by musha68k | 2025-10-14 21:17:14+00:00
Aside from cryptographically sound and open source end to end verifiable options there is one simple alternative still used in many other countries and jurisdictions:

1. voters mark paper ballots 2. observers from all parties watch the counting 3. results are tallied publicly

Yes, this is very much feasible; and no, this is not the right domain to be ingeniously efficient and cost sensitive. US being the richest country in the world or some such, etc..
by IT4MD | 2025-10-14 21:17:20+00:00
Sliding? You mean racing.

A simple example. We recently blocked chatgpt in our org. A large number of people sent in tickets with justifications like, "I use it to write reports", "I use it to write email" and more.

My partner teaches at a major university (top 200 in the US). You know how they spend about 30 mins on test days? Making sure the students mark their scantrons correctly, so it matches the version of the test they took! The test are color coded, so if you took the "blue" test, then it's pretty obvious you need to mark the answer card with the Blue Test, not the yellow test, you've never took.

Bridge too far.

I won't go into how many have their fucking parents call the teacher to beg for grades, extensions, etc.

Talk about disheartening.

The Last Question book seems more prescient every single day.