MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rmunn | 2026-01-22 02:10:24+00:00
P.S. On the subject of counting ballots behind closed doors, look up Athens, TN in 1946 if you haven't heard about it before. It's a fascinating story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_%281946%29 has a very long account, but the short version is: the sheriff of McMinn County was widely believed to be cheating on ballots by, among other things, having his deputies count the ballots behind closed doors. In 1940, 1942, and 1944, he and his cohorts "won" the election. But in 1946, a bunch of WW2 veterans returning home had formed their own voting block and had run some candidates opposing the sheriff and his cronies. When the sheriff's men took ballot boxes away to count behind closed doors again in the county jail, the WW2 vets armed themselves (without permission) from the local National Guard armory and besieged the jail. The sheriff's men eventually surrendered and returned the ballot boxes which, once counted in front of unbiased observers, showed that the sheriff's candidates had lost and the veteran candidates had won. (Surprise, surprise).

It got made into a 1992 movie called "An American Story" (which covers many things, the Battle of Athens being just one of them). I have no idea how accurate the movie is (I know it's not 100% accurate, but how much it changed I don't know).
by mojomark | 2026-01-22 02:11:06+00:00
You can film them, just not obstruct with them executing their official duties.

Personally, I'd wait another 3 years to visit until this brainless ass clown is out of office (or maybe 10 years later after our society recovers a bit from completely melting down because we have a civil war when said ass clown refuses to peacefully leave office and the large number of ass clown citizens back him up because they are afraid to truly live freely)

I make this recommendation as a very reluctant republican (who proudly has never voted for president ass clown).
by kiba | 2026-01-22 02:11:21+00:00
Subsides tend to get absorbed by monopolists of all kind.

This is why UBI is a nonstarter. It will just get absorbed by landlords. This is why you need to break up monopolies or tax them. The problem is societal endorsement of monopoly rights all kind to the point of invisibility. Witness any conversations about IP rights and lands.

But also farmers are in this situation because they chosen to compete in an overcrowded commodity market rather than specializing in profitable but more labor intensive crops.
by tamimio | 2026-01-22 02:11:52+00:00
Exactly, we can definitely build a secure online voting system, far more secure than the current paper one, but it will come with some downsides. One of them is a national digital ID mandated to all voters, which obviously can and will be abused by the government.

Another reason (besides what I mentioned in another post below) why such a secure system will never see the light, even if we can technically build it, is that the average person will start to question: why do we still need to vote for representatives if we have such a system in place? Can't we as citizens vote directly on bills/acts? Which makes sense since the current system was designed before all these tech and connectivity.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-22 02:12:28+00:00
> a relic of the Republican party's destructionist agenda of the past four decades.

I believe it goes all the way back to the founding of the country. Gridlock was viewed as preferable to tyranny. Failure to arrive at a compromise is supposed to mean that no one gets to proceed.

Of course times change and cracks show up in the system.
by rmunn | 2026-01-22 02:12:35+00:00
> I would prefer a system where even in 20 years I can go online and check how my vote was counted in older elections - this way stealing my vote would be impossible.

Understandable, but then vote-buying becomes possible. The reason vote-buying is impossible in a secret ballot is because you can't prove how you voted to anyone else. If you can look up your own ballot even five minutes after it's dropped into the box, then you can show your screen to someone else who then hands you $100 for voting the right way, and elections change from being "who has persuaded the most voters?" into "who has the most money to buy votes with?"
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-22 02:12:37+00:00
> As the romans said - you need bread and circuses to stay in power

“One thing, however, that I will note that Juvenal does not say is that the panem et circenses are either how the Roman people lost their power or how they are held under the control of emperors. Instead first the people lose their votes (no longer ‘selling’ them), then give up their cares and as a result only wish for panem et circenses, no longer taking an interest in public affairs” [1].

[1] https://acoup.blog/2024/12/20/collections-on-bread-and-circu...
by baby_souffle | 2026-01-22 02:13:29+00:00
> but if your answer for managing your network is to open the cli, what even is the desktop for

Precisely but I'm on the "if you can see your desktop at all, you're not using the computer right" side of the coin. I use KDE because keyboard shortcuts and infinite customization and reasonably powerful automation. I do not care what things look like, so long as whatever the look like, they stay in the same spot that they have been in for the last decade.

I think my distro changes the wallpaper every point release for KDE but I'm not really sure, I only see it briefly after a reboot.
by lovich | 2026-01-22 02:13:32+00:00
Nothing I have read about LLMs and related makes it seem like they will be affordable in the future when it comes to software specifically.

I will preface this that I think AI agents can accomplish impressive things, but in the same way that the Great Pyramid of Giza was impressive while not being economically valuable.

Software is constantly updating. For LLMs to be useful they need to be relatively up to date with software. That means training and from what I understand the training is the vast majority of costs and there is no plausible technical solution around this.

Currently LLMs seem amazing for software because AI companies like OpenAI or Anthropic are doing what Uber and Lyft did in their heyday where they sold dollars for pennys, just to gain market share.
Mr. Yegge and friends have made statements about if cost scares you, then step away. Even in the article this thread is about he has this quote

> Jeffrey, as we saw from his X posts, has bought so many Claude Pro Max $200/month plans (22 so far, or $4400/month in tokens) that he got auto-banned by Anthropic’s fraud detection.

And so far what I’ve seen is that he’s developed a system that lets him scale out the equivalent of interns/junior engineers en masse under his tentative supervision.

We already had the option to hire a ton of interns/junior engineers for every experienced engineer. It was quite common 1.5-3 decades ago. You’d have an architect who sketched out the bones of the application down to things like classes or functions, then let the cheap juniors implement.

Everyone moved off that model because it wasn’t as productive per dollar spent.

Mr. Yegge’s Gas Town, to me, looks like someone thought “what if we could get that same gaggle of juniors, for the same cost or more, but they were silicon instead of meat”

Nothing he’s outlined has made me convinced that the unit economics of this are going to work out better than just hiring a bunch of young bright people right out of college, which corporations are increasingly loathe to do.

If you have something to point to for why they thought is incorrect, in regards to this iteration of AI, then please link it.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-22 02:13:40+00:00
> The reason why software companies grow, is because businesses demands growth.

There's only so much growth you can achieve in any vertical - the key is to realize when you've hit that limit and cut your losses. Unfortunately as a company employee you have no incentive to do that.

I doubt Vimeo would've sold if there was still lots of growth potential on the table. They've exhausted it, and for various factors were unable to cut costs internally.

Bending Spoons evaluated the situation and determined they can still extract a certain amount of profit by massively cutting costs - they gave chunk of said expected profit to the current owners, and are now implementing said strategy.

> Elon Musk famously attempted to run Twitter "lean", and look how that ended.

The decline of Twitter has all to do with Musk's politics and lack of any kind of strategy of the product (makes sense if you see it as his personal mouthpiece rather than a business). Tech-wise it seems to be working well enough. Cutting 80% of expensive engineering staff for a 1% drop in uptime of a non-critical service with no SLAs is a no-brainer.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-22 02:13:41+00:00
> The most important feature of public elections is trust. Efficiency is one of the least important feature.

If efficiency is low enough to significantly affect turn out, you cannot trust the results.

> We should move back to paper voting.

Nowhere in the US is electronic voting used from what I know of. Estonia is the only country I know of that does internet voting, but my info could be out of date.
by icedchai | 2026-01-22 02:14:26+00:00
Non-routeable internal addresses are pretty effective at preventing external actors. When most people say "NAT", that is what they mean.

You are technically correct in that 1) disallowing external actors is not a property of "NAT" itself, 2) theoretically someone could establish routing to your RFC-1918 network if they had ISP control or had layer-2 adjacency.

Practically speaking, this is not a problem. NAT + RFC-1918 addressing provides a layer of security. Is a firewall better? Of course.
by the_snooze | 2026-01-22 02:14:50+00:00
There are non-internet ways to do that. States are really the "laboratories of democracy" on that front, with different states having affordances like long early-voting periods and mail-in voting.

However, those are in the context of whatever political system they're in. No level of efficient election design is going to put a dent in the fact that California loves direct-elected downballot offices (e.g., treasurer, controller, insurance commissioner, state judges, local judges, etc.) and referenda, which all result in super long and complicated ballots with 50+ questions each.
by pxc | 2026-01-22 02:15:45+00:00
The analogy with Android and Linux is dead-on. As is the confusing language with which people talk about these things. "Android isn't Linux" and "macOS isn't Unix" aren't quite the right way to express the sentiments and thoughts behind them— even when those sentiments and thoughts are themselves clear and reasonable.

I don't think Apple's choices to deviate from the Unix standard are necessarily for the worst; many are for the better! But their cultural deviation from the norms of the free Unices and Unix-likes is part of what makes computing on macOS feel constraining and frustrating to me. It seems like that sense of disappointment (shared by many others), and defensiveness in response to it, end up driving a lot of discussions around this.
by defrost | 2026-01-22 02:16:47+00:00
Thanks for the reply.

> Each of semiconductors, launch vehicles and telecommunications standards are moving faster than satellites last.

That's certainly a pragmatic cost based argument for not using them in the fast moving world of commercial magnetosphere constellations.

> Academic.

I feel they've moved past academic and transitioned to deployed .. at some evolution of implementation. Not commercially relevant is certainly one state of play.

I guess I was more interested in the nonlinear control issue in a field of highly variable intensity.
by phanimahesh | 2026-01-22 02:16:54+00:00
Very. Every voter is guaranteed a booth nearby (<2km away from registered address). Including a monk who gets his own polling booth because he lives so far from everyone and everything else. https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2024/5/8/an-election-booth...

Also https://www.reuters.com/world/india/family-remote-himalayas-...
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-22 02:17:04+00:00
There's a town in Alabama that skipped elections for 60 years; they'd just hand it off to a buddy. Someone finally registered to run and won by default, so ten days later they had a secret do-over to avoid a Black mayor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newbern,_Alabama#Mayoral_dispu...
by bluGill | 2026-01-22 02:17:06+00:00
It is the ecconomy. Harvest have been above average around the world the past few years. In turn supply and demand puts prices low. one bad year and harvests will be down and prices way up.

i've been working for John Deere for 15 years - I have seen this cycle several times already. people blame various politics when it happens, but the fundamentals are enough to explain nearly all of this. Anyone in farming knows this and plans for it (not always successfully)
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-22 02:18:23+00:00
>I am not a fan of how AI is shaping our society, but I don't place blame on it for these instances. It is in my opinion that AI is speeding up these aspects.

I'll use a rather extreme example here, but this sounds a bit like "Heroin addiction is just speeding up aspects that society already does. It's so easy to get addicted to smoking cigarettes".

Sometimes the catalyst is the problem, even if it's not the only problem. In this case I think placing some guardrail on both social media and AI is worthwhile.
by hex823 | 2026-01-22 02:18:39+00:00
Open4D is an open, research-driven platform for representing, compressing, processing, evaluating, and streaming time-varying 4D geometry data — the stuff that powers real-time dynamic scenes in XR, robotics, teleoperation, digital twins, and autonomy.

Right now, the 4D research ecosystem is fragmented: every paper ships its own objects, IO, codecs, metrics, and pipelines. Open4D gives you:

Stable 4D data models & IO — canonical geometry + temporal primitives.

Modular research modules — compression, tracking, editing.

Benchmarks & metrics — reproducible quality, bitrate, temporal stability evaluations.

Bindings & demos — Python, C#, C++ APIs, end-to-end apps.

Open4D aims to stop reinventing the wheel every time you want to compare methods, build pipelines, or integrate 4D into systems with tight latency/bandwidth constraints.

Repo has docs, examples, and contributions are welcome — especially new modules, datasets/benchmarks, metrics, and real-world pipelines.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-22 02:19:42+00:00
The ballots envelopes (not the ballots themselves) are keyed to the voter's identity. When the ballot is removed (not until the signature is verified and not contested), the voter is counted as voted, so if they double vote, then the second vote will be rejected. Likewise if you try to vote by mail and then at the poll, you are flagged before you even try to vote.
by bluesounddirect | 2026-01-22 02:19:54+00:00
I ran a fairly large SmartOS with project-fifo.net as the controller for a number of years . We also had the amusing time with Pluribus networks switching too. When they started they were also a Illumos based switchos . Bhyve on illumos came out of Pluribus and happened partly due to a number of FreeBSD users heckling the "SUN GODS" over why the official kvm port was a piece of shit .

In any case in the 6 years os smartos we never had any dataloss from failed disks, sure fifo and smartos had their warts but lx-zones works amazing well and i think we got Garrett D'Amore to go back to BSD land for some time . In the end we had to jump to VMWARE when Heinz gave up on fifo.

snarl/howl/chunter

https://project-fifo.net/
https://www.arista.com/en/support/pluribus-resources
by pxc | 2026-01-22 02:19:55+00:00
> In my late teens/early 20s, I went through a "phase" where I obsessed with getting "purer and purer". This was mixed with a weird obsession with non-x86 hardware, as well. Lots of NetBSD, FreeBSD and Illumos usage, some Plan9 towards the end

Sounds really fun and informative!

> lots of intellectual snobbery about "it feels better"

How does that end up being intellectual (or snobbery, for that matter)? It sounds pretty close to "follow your heart" or "I just enjoy it" to me!

> Although, UNIX was always a confusing term which never really meant all that much to begin with (when talking about commercial OSes/hardware platforms), but that's a whole other conversation...

Seems like a relevant one, for this context ;)
by jmyeet | 2026-01-22 02:20:44+00:00
This is an example of taking the wrong lesson from history.

The lesson from the last 20 years is that voters consistently vote to people who speak to their interests and their problems. The biggest electoral landslide in this time is Obama in 2008 and second place isn't even close. Obama ran as a progressive. He didn't govern as one but that's not really the point. Although it's a big part of the reason of why we're here now.

There has (now) been a 50+ year trend of declining living conditions and real wages. People are getting loaded up with debt essentially to make wealthy people even wealthier. Everything has been getting worse.

This was the turning point of the 2016 election. Trump's talk of being an outsider (he isn't), draining the swamp (he didn't) and talking to actual voter concerns was what propelled him to the nomination. And the victory because Hilary Clinton was such a dogshit bad candidate who thought she could win running as a generic corporate Democrat. You know who else run with populist messaging? Bernie Sanders. A nontrivial number of people who voted for Bernie in the primaries voted for Trump in the general. This might confuse you if you think of this as a purely Democratic-Republican divide. It wasn't and it isn't.

So why do farmers keep voting for Trump even though he now has a record of screwing them over? Because he speaks to their interest and their problems where Democrats don't talk to them at all.

2024 was a textbook example of how to intetnionally run a campaign to lose the biggest lay up election in history. No real policies. Ordinary people do not care about tax credits for small businesses. That doesn't help anyone who is struggling to afford rent and food.

So you can say "you made your bed now lie in it" to the farmers but does that help you? Does that help the country? The Democratic Party is complicit in everything that's happened by their intentional inaction and choice to lose.
by slfnflctd | 2026-01-22 02:20:51+00:00
> Stay rested Steve, keep on this side of the manic curve please, we need you

This is my biggest takeaway. He may or may not be on to something really big, but regardless, it's advancing the conversation and we're all learning from it. He is clearly kicking ass at something.

I would definitely prefer to see this be a well paced marathon rather than a series of trips and falls. It needs time to play out.
by chrismorgan | 2026-01-22 02:21:07+00:00
Two things wrong with it:

1. People have a hard time remembering the order and which characters to use. The most common error I see is (text)[href]. Spaces in between the [text] and (href) is also common.

2. ( and ) are URL code points: they can exist in URLs without being percent-encoded. This means that you can’t just paste or emit regularly serialised URLs, you also need to change any ( to %28 and ) to %29.

To fix it, you start out by using <> to delimit the URL instead of (). This fixes the serialised URL problem (< and > aren’t URL code points), and it was the traditional delimition of URLs too, where delimition was required. You could say that () was common too, but I’d argue that was just normal linguistic parenthesis rather than URL delimition. Markdown even uses <> as URL delimition already, but only for links with no custom text (called “automatic links” in Gruber’s definition, “autolinks” in CommonMark): “https://example.com” is just text, “<https://example.com>” makes it a link.

As for the way of adding a title attribute to a link, that shows that the parentheses aren’t even actually delimiting the URL. And then you get into the mess that’s […] and […][…], in addition to […](…). It’s an ill-considered mess.
by rmunn | 2026-01-22 02:21:23+00:00
Hadn't heard about that one. Fascinating. Especially since the Black mayor then challenged the secret do-over, won, as was reinstated as mayor. Then the next year there was an actual election for the first time in over 60 years, and the Black mayor won reelection 66 to 26. Not 66% to 26%, 66 votes to 26 votes. Which just goes to show what a small town that was.

P.S. Population of that town in 2020, according to the census? 133 people.
by basch | 2026-01-22 02:22:08+00:00
>People only create rough drafts and then have their "editor" make it coherent.

While sometimes I do dump a bunch of scratch work and ask for it to be transformed into organized though, more often I find that I use LLM output the opposite way.

Give a prompt. Save the text. Reroll. Save the text. Change the prompt, reroll. Then going through the heap of vomit to find the diamonds. Sort of a modern version of "write drunk, edit sober" with the LLM being the alcohol in the drunk half of me. It can work as a brainstorming step to turn fragments of though into a bunch of drafts of thought, then to be edited down into elegant thought. Asking the LLM to synthesize its drafts usually discards the best nuggets for lesser variants.
by GuB-42 | 2026-01-22 02:23:25+00:00
> If they really care about security at this level then they should ban all non in person voting methods.

Many countries do exactly that, sometimes with a few exceptions (ex: expats, disabilities, ...).

One problem with internet voting that does not apply to money is the "receipt-free" aspect. That is, a voter should not be able to prove that he voted for a particular candidate, as it would allow for vote buying, threats, etc... And it is a hard problem. With money transactions, you generally want the opposite, which is an easier problem.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-22 02:23:40+00:00
The lesson is not for me, the lesson is for these farmers who will go bankrupt, lose their farms and land, and commit suicide in some quantities of each. Perhaps don't trust someone who only tells you what you want to hear, and yet never delivers. Most unfortunately, the lesson will fall on deaf ears while we all carry on. A cautionary tale, for sure. Sometimes we trust the wrong people. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

> So you can say "you made your bed now lie in it" to the farmers but does that help you? Does that help the country?

If there are less voters like this over time, yes, I put forth that will help the country (~2M 55+ voters age out every year, ~5k per day). Whether the country is worth saving, we can save for another thread. If someone won't change their mind, nor their vote, you've arrived at an impasse. You can only wait for time to work. Again, very unfortunate.

> The Democratic Party is complicit in everything that's happened by their intentional inaction and choice to lose.

"They made me do it." is not an argument. You vote for the chainsaw, you get the chainsaw. My understanding was that conservatives held personal responsibility as a core belief. Am I mistaken? Better luck next election cycle.

I take no pleasure in discovering that this is reality. It brings me great sadness. "We must take the world as it is and not as we would like it to be." -- Maurice
by lovich | 2026-01-22 02:23:54+00:00
… but why, economically, does subsidizing farms result in a more efficient allocation of resources?

It’s doesn’t.

Agricultural subsidies in the US, and I presume most states but I’m not as well read on their policies, are a mixture of realpolitik, war preparedness, and graft.

If you are trying to square the circle, you can’t, because economic efficiency was not an input for the decisions on these subsidies.