MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by robomartin | 2026-01-22 02:51:46+00:00
That's the wrong perspective. The minute votes go into the mail system there is no way to know just how many mail-in votes might be subject to fraud. In other words, your characterization has no basis in evidence. Note that I am not asserting that massive fraud has been committed anywhere. That statement would be as impossible to support with evidence as yours.

The only thing you can state with absolute certainty is that mail-in ballots can be subject to manipulation and that this manipulation can reach enough scale to affect results in elections where the margin is so narrow that a few hundred or a few thousand votes can determine who wins.

Simple example: We receive eight ballots. There's absolutely nothing to prevent me from filling out all eight of them as I see fit and mailing them. Nothing.

There's also nothing to prevent bad actors from destroying ballots in large quantities.

Again, do not mischaracterize my statements here. I am not asserting that any of this has happened. I am saying that mail-in ballots enable potentially serious manipulation and are insecure.

This is like saying that short passwords are insecure. Lots of people use them safely and never get hacked. We all know they are unsafe. The fact that they might not be insecure enough for the general public to understand the issue (because you don't have news every day showing how many thousands of people are getting hurt) is immaterial. The truth of the matter is independent of the perceived consequences. Short passwords are insecure. Mail-in ballots are insecure.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-22 02:52:49+00:00
>I am more optimistic about AI than this post simply because I think it is a better substitute than social media. In some ways, I think AI and institutions are symbiotic

If I made a pitch for a cyberpunk dystopia where knowledge is centralized by a for-profote corporate trillionaire, I'd get a resounding yawn for originality. Yet here we are vouching for that in real time.

Social media has a lot of noise, but people understand not to take poisonshadow_42 as a central hub of general knowledge. That is sadly not the case with Grok, despite its obvious, blatant abuse of such a title.
by wakawaka28 | 2026-01-22 02:53:17+00:00
The fact it's PDF files is of little consequence. It's bootlegging. If it became popular, you would get raided for distributing copies. It doesn't happen for small-scale transfers between friends but if you start doing it on a large enough scale then you're asking for trouble. People have had similar ideas since recorded media has existed. Pirate copies of CDs, books, movies, etc. are sold freely in countries where IP laws are lax, and generally not sold in countries where these laws are enforced. The risk of getting caught could be lowered quite a bit by taking precautions, but if you're actively trying to be a large-scale pirate then you're bound to run into trouble eventually. Enforcement is focused on distributors rather than consumers usually. But with AI and increasingly invasive tech, that could change.
by jmyeet | 2026-01-22 02:53:20+00:00
No candidate is owed votes. Candidates must earn votes. If voters didn't vote for your candidate, your candidate failed. The voters didn't fail. The candidate did. And what we have in the modern Democratic Party is an intentional choice not to promise or do anything but to expect votes and simply say "Trump bad" (which he is). That's not a policy platform. And people, rightly, rejected it.

If that creates problems for you (and, let's face it, it creates problems for everyone but the billionaires at this point), you should direct your anger at the candidates not the voters, particularly when the candidate was dogshit with no policies.

Old people dying isn't going to solve this problem. They're being replaced by young (particularly male) voters who are disenchanted, disenfranchised, disempowered and disillusioned because they have nothing to hope for as society is crumbling around the and they have no future.

If you want more people to vote for your candidates, they have to offer them something. It's really that simple.

People not voting for someone who doesn't speak to their issues and offers them nothing is quite literally the least surprising and most predictable outcome.
by doodlesdev | 2026-01-22 02:53:40+00:00
> everything seems worse than eclipse

I would say the answer is that's not the general perception of the software. I'm personally migrating out of VSCode, because having to use the OpenVSX registry to have open-source builds makes me mad (I've since migrated to Zed for now, since I've never adapted well to neovim nor emacs).

In general, I believe most people see VSCode as "good enough". Maybe not the best text editor, but it's good enough at everything it does and extensible enough to the point that there's really no point to go for anything else unless you have a really good reason to.

> Im guessing the answer is probably Java is why eclipse is out of favor.

My previous answer is thinking about editors in general. But in the case of Eclipse I'd say you're right LOL.
by JSR_FDED | 2026-01-22 02:53:55+00:00
I think for many the key driver behind wanting to slim down the OS isn’t RAM or CPU use. It’s wanting to control their experience of using the computer. If the OS didn’t feel bloated nobody would care if there were 1000 processes that occasionally woke up briefly.

So what makes the OS feel bloated? It’s stuff you don’t need or want pushing its way into the foreground so you can’t ignore it. Notifications and popups are a huge culprit. Best most anxiety reducing thing I did yesterday was turn off pointless notifications like Music showing the name of the new song it’s playing. And used Little Snitch to make sure I’m never getting an update downloaded or nagged about ever again.
by marcus_holmes | 2026-01-22 02:53:59+00:00
> telling if he’s grifting or legitimately insane

or if he's talking to us from 5 years in the future.

Ignoring the financial aspect, this all makes sense - one LLM is good, 100 is better, 1000 is better still. The whole analogy with the industrial revolution makes sense to me.

> AI firms are currently burning money as fast as possible selling a dollar for 10 cents.

The financial aspect is interesting, but we're dealing with today's numbers, and those numbers have been changing fast over the last few years. I'm a big fan of Ed Zitron's writing, and he makes some really good points, but I think condemning all creative uses of LLMs because of the finances is counterproductive. Working out how to use this technology well, despite the finances not making much sense, is still useful.
by robomartin | 2026-01-22 02:54:06+00:00
> Do you have a citation

Typical dumb HN response.

As I mentioned in another comment. We get eight ballots. I could fill them all out the way I like and mail them in. I could even do that and tell everyone to sign them "because I know how they should vote".

Yeah, citation my ass. Mail-in ballots are insecure. Period. Even a cave man can understand that.
by tdb7893 | 2026-01-22 02:54:17+00:00
Are there places that don't do paper voting in the US? Ballots are still paper everywhere I've voted (mail in ballots, electronic ballots with printouts, filling in bubbles, etc. It's always been paper).

Also, even with paper ballots hand counted people aren't suddenly going to trust elections, at least not some people I know. I had someone say that hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants voted in the last election. That obviously didn't happen and there's already controls to stop that from happening but that didn't stop them from believing it. It's one of the issues with the conspiratorial thinking, it's durable even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
by teleforce | 2026-01-22 02:55:00+00:00
One of the main aims of voting system (physical or online) is to increase the participation of the voters, since the average turnout of global voters are less than 70% (filter by continents for easier average) [1].

For example even in country with pervasive internet connectivity (99%) like in Netherland the voter turnout in 2024 is only 77%.

Security technology of trust management in the centralized voting system and architecture has already been solved and well understood, and now we are even moving into zero trust with multi-factor authentications.

All this while the venerable Kerberos has been around for decades with its secure derivatives, and its secure alternatives are numerous. For the more challenging fully distributed arguably has already been solved recently by blockchain, immutable data, etc.

This is the classic example is not that you can't (as claimed by the the article), but you won't. This is what political will is all about and since this is on political voting this lame attitude is kind of expected.

[1] Voter turnout of registered voters, 2024:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/voter-turnout-of-register...
by vunderba | 2026-01-22 02:55:13+00:00
Using AI to drive text adventures / rogues has been pretty popular for a while now - I remember seeing a pretty dismal performance (although it was over a year ago) where somebody was trying to use an LLM to drive a game of Zork.

Related HN post from about 6 months ago

Evaluating LLMs Playing Text Adventures

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44877404
by Dweller1622 | 2026-01-22 02:55:39+00:00
I can find a "US v Fletcher" from 2008 that deals with obscenity law, though the only "US v McCoy" I can find was itself about charges for CSAM. The latter does seem to reference a previous case where the same person was charged for "transporting obscene material" though I can't find it.

That being said, I'm not sure I've seen a single obscenity case since Handly which wasn't against someone with a prior record, piled on charges, or otherwise simply the most expedient way for the government to prosecute someone.

As you've indicated in your own comment here, there's been many, many things over the last few decades that fall afoul the letter of the law yet which the government doesn't concern itself with. That itself seems to tell us something.
by b112 | 2026-01-22 02:55:41+00:00
You can't produce an exact amount of food. It isn't an assembly line, it's farming, it's biological.

You need to aim for excess, to ensure enough is produced during drought, animal sickness, and other variability.

What Canada does is ensure there is excess, but not crazy amounts. It also ensures the market price is fair to farmers.

What you call "high food price" we call "farmers not going bankrupt".

And while nothing is perfect, supply management is far better than the alternatives.
by artyom | 2026-01-22 02:56:00+00:00
Premise: there's people that will try to game and cheat on anything that's important, including democratic elections. No matter your voting method, those people will exist.

Solution: the basic unit (paper ballot in this case) can be understood by any adult with basic education, which means anyone can detect cheating, not just a technical wizard. The only skill you need is reading.

Give me a solution that follows the same principle and I'd consider it.

Nobody cares about results coming faster except journalists that have to fill 2-3 TV hours with nonsense until there's some numbers.

No engineer that's worth of the title would advocate for electronic voting -- unless they're in the business of selling electronic voting. See the Premise.
by nandomrumber | 2026-01-22 02:56:01+00:00
How do you propose to immobilise Claude on its back at an incline of 10 to 20 degrees, cover its face with a cloth or some other thin material and pour water onto its face over its breathing passages to test this theory of yours?

If Claude could participate, I’m sure it either wouldn’t appreciate it because it is incapable of having any such experience as appreciation.

Or it wouldn’t appreciate it because it is capable of having such an experience as appreciation.

So it ether seems to inconvenience at least a few people having to conduct the experiment.

Or it’s torture.

Therefore, I claim it is morally wrong to waterboard Claude as nothing genuinely good can come of it.
by 9rx | 2026-01-22 02:56:05+00:00
> But also farmers are in this situation because they chosen to compete in an overcrowded commodity market

Hard to predict the future. It was only a few years ago when crop prices were at record highs and some countries were on the brink of starvation because we weren't producing enough community crops.

The cure for high prices is high prices. But also, the cure for low prices is low prices. The older farmers are used to it. It seems the problem right now is that a lot of the younger guys went through an unusually long stretch of good times and have never felt the bad times before.
by ricksunny | 2026-01-22 02:56:16+00:00
Because paywall I'm unable to open the paper, but do they ever specify the structure of the small molecule itself? In the associated non-paper materials (news pieces etc.) isn't identified beyond the name they gave it, PGDHi.

Getting vibes like a compsci paper that describes all about what an algo does but hides the sourcecode itself.
by robomartin | 2026-01-22 02:56:35+00:00
I am so tired of stupidity.

How do you know I did not fill out the eight ballots we get at my household and had everyone sign them? I could do that. So can others.

And that's one way.

This isn't a question about whether it happened or not. This is about the process being unsafe from first principles. It's just like saying short passwords are insecure. Most people don't any idea. Most people will say they have never been hacked in ten years. That does not mean they are secure. They are not.
by bentocorp | 2026-01-22 02:57:11+00:00
This is great news and hopefully makes SwiftUI more feasible as a long term cross-platform UI option.

What would be great is if Apple started working with and contributing to this toolset.

What would be even better is if Apple then open-sourced all (or at least some) of their SwiftUI implementations.

What would be amazing is the community can then takeover some of the issues in SwiftUI – especially on macOS – and help to make it more flexible, feature-rich and comparable to UI toolkits like AppKit.

A good, cross-platform, Swift-based UI toolkit would go a long way to ensuring increasing and enduring cross-platform Swift usage.
by kldg | 2026-01-22 02:57:18+00:00
looks like you've made considerable changes since comments; all prices I checked were accurate (while nothing I checked on diskprices was). this looks genuinely helpful as this is something I look into myself by manually looking around, and is clean/easy-to-use; bookmarked it. only thing I might like on top of this is to be able to filter by if renewed or not, though they seem to often have it in the product title.
by coppsilgold | 2026-01-22 02:57:53+00:00
It's more sophisticated than that. A single movie can be fragmented into 1000s of fragments, each fragment carries 1 bit. It's called A/B forensic watermarking. So you need to insert a 1-bit watermark into a video segment that is a few megabytes, there is no feasible way to defeat this as a pirate unless the watermarker is incompetent. Averaging will not work. The watermark will also build up over time, with more movies etc.

See AWS offering:

For large-scale per-viewer, implement a content identification strategy that allows you to trace back to specific clients, such as per-user session-based watermarking. With this approach, media is conditioned during transcoding and the origin serves a uniquely identifiable pattern of media segments to the end user. A session to a user-mapping service receives encrypted user ID information in the header or cookies of the request context and uses this information to determine the uniquely identifiable pattern of media segments to serve to the viewer. This approach requires multiple distinctly watermarked copies of content to be transcoded, with a minimum of two sets of content for A/B watermarking. Forensic watermarking also requires YUV decompression, so encoding time for 4K feature length content can take upwards of 20 hours. DRM service providers in the AWS Partner Network (APN) are available to aid in the deployment of per-viewer content forensics.

<https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/streaming...>

This will be more challenging for text.
by hintymad | 2026-01-22 03:00:46+00:00
What I failed to understand is why only in the US the voting procedure is so controversial. Want paper vote? That's racism. Want counting in a day? That's xenophobia. Want to limit certain time window for counting? That's definitely racism. It's funny that the US criticized that EU countries were getting less democratic. Well, at least those countries have a much more sane voting process.
by ehnto | 2026-01-22 03:00:51+00:00
I did spend a serious amount of commercial time developing fronted UIs in React, Angular, and the before times in vanilla JS/css. I even wrote my own UI framework in Web Components, developed my own CSS framework used by an agency churning out projects for years. You get the idea, I did the thing, commercially, for over a decade. React and Angular are absolutely more complex in practice. That's fine, if you want the features go ham. But you don't need them, and most people mis-use the power and end up with a slow complex mess.

Perhaps those same people would have a slow complex mess in vanilla tools too though, so maybe React is a scapegoat like PHP was, and Javascript was.
by robomartin | 2026-01-22 03:01:17+00:00
I have to present my passport to get on a plane, enter into another country, register into a hotel and return to this country. I have to show either my passport card (another passport-like ID in the US) or my RealID-equipped drivers license to fly within the US. They also make me stand in front of a camera.

Nearly every nation on earth does this. It's nothing new. We have the technology and the means. This isn't a problem.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-22 03:02:02+00:00
> how do you actually do that and prove that it's safe?

Obviously you can't. You assume it's best in class based on various factors including the fact that this is the same juggernaut that runs project zero. They also somehow manage to secure their cloud offering against malicious clients so presumably they can manage to parse a pdf to an image without getting pwned.

It would certainly be interesting to know what their internal countermeasures are but I don't know if that's publicized or not.
by QuantumNomad_ | 2026-01-22 03:02:30+00:00
I already have Zoom installed on the work computer but for some reason it has started doing this weird thing where every time I click a Zoom meeting link in Google Calendar, Google Chrome downloads a copy of the Zoom installer at the same time as it opens the already installed Zoom. I didn’t notice until I already had six recently downloaded copies of the installer in the Downloads folder.

No idea why this happens. But it’s probably part of the crappy pushiness of Zoom to get people to install their app that makes them trigger a download of the installer because either they are not detecting that Zoom is already installed at the right time, or they are so eager to download the installer that they don’t even care about whether or not you already have it installed.

I’ve disliked Zoom since the beginning for their antics, and the only reason I have it installed is because I have to for the meetings at work, and the work computer belongs to the company I work for anyway, not to me.

I would never install Zoom on my own computer.
by userbinator | 2026-01-22 03:02:47+00:00
Several years ago I remember making something that could be considered a custom "distro" of macOS that would be VM-oriented and as minimal as it could be for CI purposes, by starting with the recovery/installer partition and adding what I needed while deleting what I didn't. Not surprisingly, there was next-to-no precedent of such that I could find, and my biggest source of information was the Hackintosh community. Nonetheless it was not too difficult, if tedious, to do so, and the final disk image size I arrived at was less than 1GB. In general the macOS community is, to put it bluntly, mostly computer-illiterate non-power-users who will either advocate against you or otherwise have no idea what you're talking about. In contrast there's a HUGE amount of existing information on modding Windows, and of course Linux sits at the other extreme.
by Alupis | 2026-01-22 03:03:12+00:00
> The most important feature of public elections is trust.

Agreed.

However, in some states, such as California, mail-in voting has become the default.

What's used to verify identity and integrity? Your signature from your voter's affidavit of registration, a signature from any past voter form, or literally an "X"[1]. Your signature doesn't even need to match, it just must have "similar characteristics". You can print your name or sign in cursive, you can even just use initials. They're all accepted.

We're firmly on the "honor system".

Pair that with lack of voter ID laws, and we have a system that's designed to be untrustworthy.

Yes, I agree, a state issued ID should be free...

[1] https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/elections-code/elec-sect-3019/
by marcosdumay | 2026-01-22 03:03:30+00:00
> but I think Brazil solved this by making sure to control the machine

It's bullshit, we don't control anything. Our voting machines are Linux computers that never survived a public auditing, so the government stopped let the public audit them.

If either China or the US decided to seriously invest into corrupting the hardware, it would be a several years long process but would actually cost less than our presidential campaigns. There are probably several ways to corrupt the machines software without anybody noticing (it a Linux PC, full of opaque firmware), that we won't know about because the details aren't public.

Without a paper confirmation that we could audit, nobody can't claim it's working. What would expect the results to be if it was compromised?
by defrost | 2026-01-22 03:04:53+00:00
> There's absolutely nothing to prevent me from filling out all eight of them as I see fit and mailing them. Nothing.

Just as there is nothing to prevent a person threatening or physically coercing 8 members of their household to vote as they direct.

This is hard to scale up into the hundreds.

WRT mail-in ballots, these are common place in Australia.

You post in a provided envelope to the AEC address, that outer envelope indentifies you against the voter rolls, just as you are identified when you attend a physical voting location.

The inner sealed envelope contains your voing slip - this is removed and passed on to the "votes from district" counting bucket .. just as all the voting slips from physical voting locations are.

In the checksumming of the election the same person being marked down as having voted multiple times, whether at various locations or by multiple mail in ballots, gets caught and investigated.

At this point voters are marked off against registration rolls and actual votes are anonymous.

This is important in an Australian election as no one should know that someone drew a crude suggestive image of their local member and submitted that.

The real downside of mail in voting is missing out on a sausage sizzle with others in your district at a voting location on voting day.