MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jcrawfordor | 2026-01-22 01:43:35+00:00
This is the system used in the majority of the United States. Direct-recording electronic voting systems were never that common, briefly peaked after the Help America Vote Act as the least expensive option to meet accessibility requirements, and have become less common since then as many election administrators have switched to either prectinct tabulators or direct-recording with voter-verified paper audit trail.

In the 2026 election, only 1.3% of voters were registered in jurisdictions that use direct-recording electronic machines without a voter verifiable paper audit trail (https://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/#mode/navigate/map/voteE...). 67.8% of voters are registered in precincts that primarily use hand-marked ballots, and the balance mostly use BMDs to generate premarked ballots.
by mark-r | 2026-01-22 01:43:57+00:00
Back in the 1970's I tried to come up with a metric time system by breaking a day into powers of 10. A centiDay was 14.4 minutes.

I realized it would never catch on, because a 30 minute TV show would have to fit into 28.8 minutes, and the only way to do that was to lose a couple of commercials. Never gonna happen.
by mbirth | 2026-01-22 01:43:58+00:00
Regarding the Toniebox and custom audiobooks - do you know that there’s a tool to add audio files that can be triggered by custom NFC tags?

Here’s the talk about it:

https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-11993-toniebox_reverse_engineeri...

And the project website:

https://tonies-wiki.revvox.de/

There’s even a custom firmware that can send activity data to Home Assistant, can pull audio from a local server, etc.
by austin-cheney | 2026-01-22 01:44:10+00:00
Let’s see them try it in Texas where castle doctrine is taken seriously and everyone is armed to the teeth. It won’t take many examples before they rethink their approach.

Edit. Castle doctrine probably won’t apply.

The memo says under general guidelines that officers and agents using a method called Form I-205 must “knock and announce” and that “in announcing, officers and agents must state their identity and purpose.”
Ask HN: Anyone seeing copy/paste reliability issues in ChatGPT Web on macOS?
by sallyrideauto | 2026-01-22 01:44:34+00:00
I’m trying to understand whether this is a broader web UI pattern or something specific to certain environments.

Environment:
- macOS (Intel-based)
- Chromium browsers (Chrome / Edge)
- Web app that streams content incrementally into the DOM (token-by-token style)

Observed behavior:
- Text selection appears normal, but copy often returns empty content
- Partial selections are especially unreliable
- Happens during or shortly after streaming updates
- Reproduces across clean sessions and after clearing cache
- Blocks workflows that depend on copying generated text

What I’ve ruled out:
- Extensions
- Cache/session issues
- OS-level clipboard permissions

Context:
- Support acknowledged it as an unresolved, ongoing reliability issue
- No workaround or fix timeline was provided
- I’m trying to understand root causes or mitigation patterns rather than complain

Questions:
- Have you seen similar copy/paste failures with streamed or incremental rendering?
- Known anti-patterns with selection ranges being invalidated by re-renders?
- Practical mitigations (buffering, pausing updates on selection, virtualization limits)?
- Does this sound more like a Chromium issue or a framework-level one?

Appreciate any pointers or similar experiences.
by brailsafe | 2026-01-22 01:44:52+00:00
Seems like a reasonable hobby, people love doing this, but idk that not doing something you already wouldn't be inclined to do carries much weight.

Almost like how people who haven't moved out of their hometown cite all sorts of reasons or apparent faults of the place they haven't moved to, like it's too expensive; it's too rainy; it's too busy; it's not sunny enough; but really, they weren't in the business of leaving anyway, because they're comfortable or don't know how to make friends, or they stubbornly try to love a place they actually hate, or they have family there and a support structure, or they have no ambition, or they actually just like the place. Either way, the moving goalposts and random critiques don't matter, it's not the hypothetical destination's burden to court someone who won't make that leap anyway, but there may be a select few fence sitters who are just waiting for a push.

I don't think Spotify's main objective is to persuade hobbyist music collectors to stop, but rather it's to persuade people who want to access music anywhere to pay for the service, which may or may not be someone forced to ditch their vinyl collection or Zune. Voting with your wallet only matters if the service you actually might pay for or are paying for stops being a compelling product.
by doodlesdev | 2026-01-22 01:45:01+00:00
Flutter doesn't use Skia anymore and you can absolutely bind to native libraries from Flutter with ease [0]. The current strategy (build hooks) is relatively new. You can also just write Kotlin or Swift for your application [1] using channel APIs. Finally, you can still have native pages in your app if needed for certain widgets [2] and still save time rewriting everything and all of your business logic for every single other page of the application that doesn't need those widgets. In fact, you can even mix native widgets and Flutter-rendered widgets in the same screen.

[0]: https://docs.flutter.dev/platform-integration/bind-native-co...

[1]: https://docs.flutter.dev/platform-integration/platform-chann...

[2]: https://docs.flutter.dev/add-to-app
by insane_dreamer | 2026-01-22 01:46:32+00:00
Quite surprised there wasn't mention of the Trump tariffs on China causing the collapse of China imports of US soybeans, which by the way, has persisted even though the original tariffs were reduced, causing lasting damage to farmers.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenroberts/2026/01/17/china-pur...
by pryce | 2026-01-22 01:46:57+00:00
If instead of looking at it as an attempt to enshrine a viable, internally consistent ethical framework, we choose to look at it as a marketing document, seeming inconsistencies suddenly become immediately explicable:

1. "thou shalt not destroy the world" communicates that the product is powerful and thus desirable.

2. "do not generate CSAM" indicates a response to the widespread public notoriety around AI and CSAM generation, and an indication that observers of this document should feel reassured with the choice of this particular AI company rather than another.
by garrickvanburen | 2026-01-22 01:47:01+00:00
It’s likely the land would be far more valuable as something else.

Small family farms, while romanticized, have all the problems of any small business competing with larger professionalized businesses; consistency in operations, consistency in output quality, access to resources - including people and machines.

Additionally, for their own operational simplicity big buyers prefer interacting with as few suppliers as possible - so, market forces have been driving consolidation for decades.
Ask HN: How do you audit autonomous AI agent decisions?
by credentum | 2026-01-22 01:47:07+00:00
Building agents that can spend money (via AP2/payment APIs). Regulators want audit trails. Agents use tools from multiple vendors.

Problem: No unified way to prove why an agent made a decision. Each vendor logs their piece, but the full decision chain is fragmented.

Anyone solved this? Especially interested in:
- Cross-vendor decision provenance
- What to log (CoT? Context? Just actions?)
- Storage (centralized DB vs. immutable ledger)
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-22 01:47:12+00:00
>The vast majority of web devs with less than 5 years of experience simply don't understand plain javascript well enough

they are never tested on it, and many won't dig that deep in the day-to-day. Whose fault is it that they don't know plain javascript well enough? That's the result of shipping "content" over any other metric of proper software engineering.

Funnily enough I did take a mini-course (not a week, but we're talking maybe 100 hours of work as a recreational online summer class) in plain javascript at my university. Quite the quirky language. But this was in ES3 or so, so maybe there's many more guard rails these days against the core jank that makes up JS
by justalever | 2026-01-22 01:48:03+00:00
That's fair. Probably not a good fit for you then. I wanted to keep the human element alive where I could with this project and I know AI will likely take all our jobs, so be it. It's solving a need for me when it comes to building ideas quickly so I figured maybe others would benefit. I'm a product designer by day and love building front-ends so it's also a passion project.
by deathanatos | 2026-01-22 01:48:05+00:00
Receipt-freeness (i.e., a secret ballot) is usually the desired property. Yes, a lot of people like you state they desire verifiable votes. But that's where you need to respond to the points the person above you is making: how is such a system not also susceptible to coercion and bribery?

(However you would verify your vote, imagine the person who is coercing you is just standing over your shoulder with threat of force. An example might be an abusive husband who does not want to allow their wife to vote freely/against him. A briber might simply force you to allow them to look over your shoulder before they'll pay you off.)

Vs. paper ballots in a polling place: a coercer would not be permitted in the poll booth with me. I get to vote, and when I leave, … I can tell them whatever, but it does not need to match my vote. It utterly defeats bribery, as the briber has no way to verify that I'm doing what they way.
by rmunn | 2026-01-22 01:48:06+00:00
The thing about paper ballots is that the ways to cheat with them are well-known ("finding" ballots in the trunk of a car, "losing" ballot boxes on the way to the counting center, counting the ballots behind locked doors with observers not present, and so on), and have been well known for centuries. So the counters to them (ballot boxes sealed with an official seal once full, only sealed ballot boxes will be opened and counted, neutral observers present at all times when ballot boxes are being transported and/or counted, and so on) are also well-known. If those anti-cheating counters are in place, that gives you quite a lot of trust in the results. And if observers get thrown out and then ballot counting continues behind closed doors, you can have a reasonable suspicion that cheating is going on, and can make a stink and demand a redo of the vote.

With Internet voting, the ways to cheat are not all that well-known among the general population, and even among an audience like HN I bet we couldn't come up with all the ways to cheat. (That's not a challenge!) So there's going to be fundamentally less trust in the election process than with paper ballots, even if the Internet-voting system was actually made completely secure. (And I'm not persuaded it can be made completely secure, given that secret ballots are a fundamental requirement of the process).

So yes, paper ballots are very much the way to go.
by sbuk | 2026-01-22 01:48:44+00:00
You’re confusing operating mode with operating system.

SIP/SSV don’t create a different macOS, they restrict mutation and introspection. They don’t change the POSIX surface, the SUS semantics, or the kernel interfaces being certified. They just stop test harnesses from instrumenting the system without elevated privilege.

By your logic, no modern OS is anything it claims to be unless you run it in an insecure debug configuration. Linux isn’t POSIX because you need root. Windows isn’t Windows because kernel debugging exists. That’s obviously nonsense.

The Open Group certifies macOS 26 as shipped. Temporarily relaxing protections to run a conformance suite does not produce a “different OS”, it produces a different trust configuration of the same one.

Saying “it’s not really UNIX because SIP is on” is like saying a container isn’t Linux because it doesn’t let you mount /proc without extra privileges.
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-01-22 01:49:19+00:00
Indeed, many people now get a erroneous covid tax-relief refund bill for not qualifying for a program they never signed up for in the first place.

One local scammer made off with a $5m government refund for a fraudulent business tax filing. You can't make this stuff up if you tried...

At some point, one is just amazed at the size of the cons people pull online. =3
by OgsyedIE | 2026-01-22 01:50:15+00:00
Some of them date back to 'westward expansion', where they were incentives to encourage settler immigration (e.g. Texas tax exemption from 1839). They've stayed on the books because nobody wants the trouble of suggesting their removal.

More generally, however, it's a cost that is paid to support massive efficiency gains in other sectors. Like roads, aviation or the military. The freight system particularly would be unreliable if food prices floated according to only supply and demand, due to freights vulnerability to political upheavals, militias, etc.
by dandelany | 2026-01-22 01:50:24+00:00
The property you are talking about is generally called "deniability" in the literature, whereas the GP is talking "verifiability" ie. being able to verify your own vote is cast correctly. They are both valuable, sometimes mutually exclusive, but not necessarily, see eg. https://petsymposium.org/popets/2024/popets-2024-0021.pdf
by Onavo | 2026-01-22 01:51:11+00:00
> Conceivably, if Microsoft cared, they could get UNIX® 03 certification via WSL1, WSL2, or some hacked together reincarnation of SFU with parts from WSL1.

They probably could if they really want to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem

The Windows NT kernel was designed to extend and embrace .
by kiba | 2026-01-22 01:51:14+00:00
Growing excess amount of food is part of food security, but farmers are going bankrupt because they focused on labor efficient agricultural commodity products to the exclusion of everything else. For many farmers, it's not even a full time job

I rather we focus on increasing food security in other way.

Maybe we shouldn't be turning corns into cows as that reduce the amount of energy we are able to access. But how do we keep access to farmlands that we don't use now that we aren't turning corns into cows? I suppose we could just use these lands as pasture.
Show HN: A fast, ad-free wiki for Where Winds Meet (built with Astro)
by causalzap | 2026-01-22 01:51:16+00:00
Hi HN,

I built this database for the game "Where Winds Meet" because existing wikis were too slow and heavy.

It is built with Astro and Tailwind, focusing on performance and static site generation. It supports 5 languages (using JSON-based i18n) and achieves perfect Lighthouse scores by shipping zero client-side JS for the content pages.

The project is open-source: [Insert GitHub Link Here]

Tech stack:
- Astro (SSG)
- TypeScript
- JSON for data storage (no database)

Would love any feedback on the structure or performance!
by tamimio | 2026-01-22 01:51:42+00:00
I think this relies on the old argument that anything connected to the internet is potentially insecure. While it might have some truth, practically we all do very sensitive stuff securely while connected to the internet. The risk is there, always, but you put all the measures to mitigate it and even prevent it.

The idea that a malware could be on a phone “altering things automatically” feels like a 90s FUD cliche. If an online voting system existed, it won't be like a poll that you see on Twitter, for instance; it will be far more involved. For example, we can have blockchain as the network, and not just transparent to all, but even after you vote you can still check your vote and see if it was potentially altered, and a proper electronic chain of custody can also ensure that the vote was counted per the process, and all of that is visible to anyone who would like to check and even count ALL the votes yourself, again, just like how transparent blockchain is.

And saying paper voting is more secure isn't true at all, because these votes will be counted electronically at some point, either by a machine or just a simple Excel sheet, opening the same risks as the previous one except here, if it would happen, you will never know and you as a voter can't trace the vote from when you voted all the way until it was counted. The voting process should be designed in a way with zero trust in mind, just like how secure systems are designed now, like storage, encryption, vpn, etc., and voting should too.

I personally believe that we can build a very secure, robust, and trustworthy system that can be used for voting online, but I think no one wants that for all sorts of political purposes, either by actually altering the results that could go unnoticed, or at least keeping the window open to blame the results on a faulty system.
by crm9125 | 2026-01-22 01:51:53+00:00
"Ag. can't just be about profit."

Somewhere off in the distance I hear billionaires laughing.

This is only important if you care about the future of humans. At least in America, attention spans have shortened, empathy has decreased, and individualism has increased. Billionaires don't care about the future beyond their own life. And unfortunately, one of the worst of them is now the head of the country.
by bikelang | 2026-01-22 01:51:56+00:00
We have mail voting as a default in Colorado. When you get your license you are registered to vote and opted in automatically. The one piece that might improve it further is if it came with a stamp to mail back. Otherwise you just drop it off at a drive-up ballot box. You can also vote in person if you want. Hardly anybody does it so there’s never a line.

You get text messages each step of the process too. “Your ballot has been mailed”/“your ballot has been delivered”/“your ballot has been received”/“your ballot has been counted - thanks for voting”.
by b112 | 2026-01-22 01:53:23+00:00
It's pencil in Canada too. Pencil works. Ink pens stop working, and are far more expensive than pencil in bulk. Voting is old. Using fountain pens, and quills to vote, is far more annoying than pencil when it just works.

The mark of vote being indelible or not is irrelevant. The monitoring and protection of the ballots is far more important. For example, representatives of all political parties are involved in the count, oversight by an agency, etc. If you had time to erase and re-mark ballots, you could swap out paper ballets too.
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-01-22 01:53:36+00:00
Looks like. More recent papers still find vulnerabilities too.

Steelmanning: They're putting the effort in so we don't have to. Either they find a way and it'll be awesome, or at some point they become an object lesson.

edit: Or third path: They muddle along just well enough with a system that can't work in theory, but ends up nearly working in practice, stochastically? (see also: email, wikipedia, or a hundred other broken things that can't possibly work but are still hanging on. )
by Brybry | 2026-01-22 01:53:45+00:00
Yep, I believe Louisiana is the only US state that does electronic voting without a paper trail. [1]

And not all paper systems are good either. I'm sure everyone remembers the disaster that was the punch card system used by Florida in the 2000 election...

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_equipment_by_state
by yunnpp | 2026-01-22 01:53:53+00:00
No, it's not black and white, that's the whole point. How would you answer to the case I outlined above, according to your rules? It's called a paradox for a reason. Plus, that there is no right answer in many situations does not preclude that an answer or some approximation of it should be sought, similarly to how the lack of proof of God's existence does not preclude one from believing and seeking understanding anyway. If you have read the Bible and derived hard and clear rules of what to do and not do in every situation, then I'm not sure what is it you understood.

To be clear, I am with you in believing that there is, indeed, an absolute right/wrong, and the examples you brought up are obviously wrong. But humans cannot absolutely determine right/wrong, as is exemplified by the many paradoxes, and again as it appears in Genesis. And that is precisely a sort of soft-proof of God: if we accept there is an absolute right/wrong, but unreachable from the human realm, then where does that absolute emanate from? I haven't worded that very well, but it's an argument you can find in literature.
by timschmidt | 2026-01-22 01:54:12+00:00
Good question. Canada has twice as many registered firearms as the US (though the number of unregistered firearms is likely greater in the US). It's certainly not difficult to purchase guns in either country. And Canada experiences an order of magnitude fewer gun deaths per capita than the US. The US is somewhat unique among western nations in how it handles mental illness, and crime, and I would suggest those are more fruitful avenues of inquiry.

So I'll stand by the stance that individuals are responsible for their own actions, that tools cannot bear responsibility for how they are used, and that all tools serve constructive and destructive purposes, sometimes simultaneously.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-22 01:54:16+00:00
> This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession.

This is just plain false. The total software and SaaS tool spend at every company I’ve worked for in the past decade has been incredibly high.

Developers also commonly bring their own paid tools when it’s allowed: JetBrains is common. Many people have paid Git GUIs or merge tools.

I think the hard truth is that getting adoption on a new paid tool is really hard, especially when you’re not sure if it’s even going to be around in a couple years.

When there are open source alternatives it’s usually not about cost. We’d happily pay for something that was higher quality and helped us develop faster if it didn’t come with its own set of risks. The difference is that OSS is something we can pick up and carry along with the community even if the maintainers go a different direction. We don’t have to worry about sudden license price increases or unfavorable terms appearing at renewal time, which happens constantly now.
by jasoncbuckley | 2026-01-22 01:54:32+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a small web tool called Cipher Copy to scratch a personal itch: quick text encoding/decoding without accounts, ads, or sending data to third-party servers.

Everything runs client-side in the browser. The focus is speed, simplicity, and privacy — open a page, paste text, encode/decode, copy, done.

I’m curious:

Is this something you’d actually bookmark?

What encodings or workflows would make it more useful?

Any UX or performance issues jump out?

Link: https://cipher-copy-973c977c.base44.app/Encode

Thanks for taking a look — feedback welcome.
by xmprt | 2026-01-22 01:54:40+00:00
> We should move back to paper voting.

We already use paper voting. If you mean go back to a time before voting machines, then I fear that would actually reduce trust because the amount of tabulation errors, data entry, and spoilt ballots would skyrocket. The only people who are increasing doubt in voting machine are the same people who are trying to disenfranchise voters and not accepting the results of past elections.

The last presidential election where doing a paper recount might have helped was in 2000 and believe it or not, the same party that's calling for abolishing voting machine today was the one who sued to avoid a paper recount then.