MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-22 02:24:09+00:00
>what is the difference between wealth that you can't spend in a million lifetimes and "no" wealth at all?

Unimaginable wealth means you live as comfortably as you want. no wealth means you are out on the streets and can't even afford the basics needed to get yourself out of the rut society threw you in.

If I'm to take this as a comparison of "wealth ends up in the hands of one", the difference with communism is that the one with the wealth still needs to distribute it, lest they are driven out by a coup or by annihilating all the power they had (the power over their people, who are now dead or fled).

Captistlism makes no such promise of distribution, and who to uprise against is much less clear. toppling a monopoly leader also doesn't necessarily destroy the institution either.

>the final notion we may need to shed is that we are people, individual agents, instead of nonseparate natural phenomena.

If we give up our humanity to someone else, we may as well be. But that's not something I relinquish easily.
by sjm-lbm | 2026-01-22 02:24:38+00:00
This was common in Texas, but becomes challenging when one polling place serves voters that might have different elections to vote for - say, at a polling place on the line between two school districts or something like that. You can't just print one sheet of paper, and it to everyone, and call it a day. Toss in a few different jurisdictions that don't directly overlay each other, and the number of combinations become nontrivial.

(the machines used in Texas vary by county, in my county we use Hart InterCivic machines that are touchscreen but produce a paper trail - honestly I think it works well)
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-22 02:24:45+00:00
As a kid living in Vicksburg MS in the late 80s, this is what irked me about in person voting. We lived in county but in a fairly dense suburban area with some biggish apartments nearby (SFH was mostly white, the apartments were mostly black). Our polling site was way out in the boonies, somewhere you could never get to without driving for 45 minutes...I was shocked when my dad took me with him.

There was really no good reason for that, unless they were really against a certain segment of the population voting (a lot of people in the apartments didn't have cars, or were too busy to go so far to vote).
by dstroot | 2026-01-22 02:26:41+00:00
I suppose I'm an optimist. I believe it is possible to create a secure online voting system. My life savings might be held at Fidelity, Merrill, or elsewhere, my banking is online, 90% of my shopping is online and it all has "good enough" security. Plus most banks seem to be well behind the state of the art in security. I believe with the technologies we have available today, we could create a secure, immutable, auditable voting system. Do I believe any of the current vendors have done that? NO. But I believe it could be done.
by pfisch | 2026-01-22 02:27:21+00:00
The only thing seriously reducing trust in elections is anti-democratic politicians who will ALWAYS find a convenient reason to claim the election is rigged, and many of their followers will believe and propagate that lie to create distrust in the election.

There is really nothing we can do to satisfy these people except create some kind of structure they demand which will somehow be made to heavily lean in their favor. That is what will satisfy them. Nothing else will.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-22 02:27:21+00:00
Without having access to the source code we can only speculate but I believe even in those days YouTube already outgrew vertical scaling and thus had to be built as a horizontally-scalable system. That is the hard part.

Adding extra nodes to an existing horizontally-scalable system (that has already been operating and has its bugs ironed out) is much easier.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-22 02:27:25+00:00
>I don't live in the US but is it impossible to buy basic ingredients, fruit, vegetables, grains, meat whatever etc., and actually cook something?

Sort of. To add to what the other replies had to say, the US government subsidizes different things. That's why even basic ingredients may have high fructose corn syrup in it. Be it as a primary ingredient, or to try and dillute the actual ingredient you want in that particular piece of food.

and since it's subsidized, these can be cheaper to eat here than to get some good fruits and veggies.
by nl | 2026-01-22 02:28:42+00:00
It's worth understanding the history of Anthropic. There's a lot of implied background that helps it make sense.

To quote:

> Founded by engineers who quit OpenAI due to tension over ethical and safety concerns, Anthropic has developed its own method to train and deploy “Constitutional AI”, or large language models (LLMs) with embedded values that can be controlled by humans.

https://research.contrary.com/company/anthropic

And

> Anthropic incorporated itself as a Delaware public-benefit corporation (PBC), which enables directors to balance stockholders' financial interests with its public benefit purpose.

> Anthropic's "Long-Term Benefit Trust" is a purpose trust for "the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity". It holds Class T shares in the PBC, which allow it to elect directors to Anthropic's board.

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

TL;DR: The idea of a constitution and related techniques is something that Anthropic takes very seriously.
by robomartin | 2026-01-22 02:29:06+00:00
The problem isn't paper voting. It's paper voting by mail. It has to be in person and we have to verify the person who shows up to vote is legally allowed to vote. Without those two checks you cannot have safe elections.

I have a friend somewhere else in the world who is in the business of providing electronic voting machines to governments (cities and countries) to run elections. I won't mention where in the world because there are only so many of these companies and his is very prominently known in the region he serves. They develop the machines, write the software and provide the service.

He told me stories of various elections across the region where governments or specific political parties ask him to tilt the playing field in their favor by secretly altering the code. He has refused every single such requests because, as he put it, if you do for one side or the other, sooner or later you get burned (or worse) and it's over. He happens to be one of the honest and responsible players. That's not necessarily the case for others.

When I asked him about US elections, his answer was very simple: I can't believe you allow people to vote by mail. You don't know who's voting. You don't know how many times they are voting. You don't know if someone is voting for a dead person. You don't know if the person who filled out the form is legally allowed to vote. You don't know if votes are being intercepted and discarded or somehow replaced. You don't know anything. And this all before a single mail-in vote is counted.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-22 02:29:09+00:00
You have to trust the voting place/ballot receiver in all cases. Like, after they take your name, you need to make sure that they aren't secretly associating your name with the ballot you are filling in. Likewise, if you vote by mail, you need to make sure that they aren't associating your identity on the envelope with the anonymous ballot inside the envelope.
by nl | 2026-01-22 02:29:59+00:00
> Anthropic incorporated itself as a Delaware public-benefit corporation (PBC), which enables directors to balance stockholders' financial interests with its public benefit purpose.

> Anthropic's "Long-Term Benefit Trust" is a purpose trust for "the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity". It holds Class T shares in the PBC, which allow it to elect directors to Anthropic's board.

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

Google didn't have that.
by iamnothere | 2026-01-22 02:30:07+00:00
Unless you’re talking about crypto, your internet banking hacker will not get away with anything significant. You can’t just “hack the bank” and take a million dollars. Banks only transfer funds digitally to one another by agreement through systems like SWIFT, and these transactions are traceable and reversible. Changing some ones and zeros in your account and then attempting to withdraw it all would raise a ton of flags, and you would need to breach an unrealistic number of systems and processes to make it possible.

At best you might be able to scam someone into sending you a few hundred dollars via Zelle. Some scam centers do this 24/7, but it isn’t that easy, and apparently they rely on human trafficking to acquire free labor.

The complex systems backing internet banking (including the people and processes) are immense in scale. They evolved over decades and were honed and improved as real problems occurred. Needless to say, there is no room for iterative trial and error in elections.

If you hack the bank you get very little, at least today. If you hack an election you get everything. No thanks. No to electronic voting.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-22 02:30:19+00:00
But for every outlier that can perpetually keep unlocking new revenue streams with more features, there's probably 100 companies that burn themselves out trying to do the same and end up sold for pennies on the dollar.

The key is knowing when to stop. Unfortunately permanent employment does not provide an incentive for anyone involved to speak up when they think it's that time.
by alphazard | 2026-01-22 02:30:44+00:00
This was a fascinating read, thanks for posting.

I'm not totally convinced that the threat model is realistic. The watermarker has to embed the watermark, the only place to do that is in the least significant bits of whatever the message is.
If it's an audio file then the least significant bits of each sample would work.
If it's a video file then the LSBs in a DCT bin may also be unnoticeable.
It can really only go in certain places, without it affecting the content in a meaningful way.
If it's in a header, or separate known location, then the pirate can just delete those bits.

The threat model presented says the pirates have to go with one of the copies, or only correct errors that are different between 2 copies.
That's the part that I don't think is realistic.
If the pirates knew that the file was marked, and the scheme used to mark it, but didn't know the key (a standard threat model for things like encryption), then they could inject their own noise into wherever the watermark could be hiding, and now the problem is the watermarker trying to send a message on a noisy channel, where the pirates have a jammer.
I don't even think you have to sacrifice quality, since the copy you have already has noise, and you just need to inject the same amount (or more).
by robertk | 2026-01-22 02:31:55+00:00
Why not leak a dataset of N full text paraphrasings of the material, together with a zero-knowledge proof of how to take one of the paraphrasings and specifically "adjust" it to the real document (revealed in private to trusted asking parties)? Then the leaker can prove they released "at least the one true leak" without incriminating themselves. There is a cryptographic solution to this issue.
by p-e-w | 2026-01-22 02:32:55+00:00
Elections in most countries involve tens of thousands of volunteers for running ballot stations and counting votes.

That is a feature, not a problem to be solved. It means that there are tens of thousands of eyes that can spot things going wrong at every level.

Any effort to make voting simpler and more efficient reduces the number of people directly involved in the system. Efficiency is a problem even if the system is perfectly secure in a technological sense.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-22 02:33:03+00:00
>Not a single country can report harmonious society free of corruption and unnecessary suffering.

By hat metric, capitalism has failed as well. Any successes came from breaking the pure principle and either breaking apart competition (antitrust), regulating competition to comply, or employing non-capistialistic services to support it (social security being one of the big ones).

No point talking in absolutes.
by BroadacreRidge | 2026-01-22 02:33:10+00:00
Can you elaborate on the "immense pain"? I don't disagree that monopolies in big AG are a huge problem, but last time I saw someone make this point, I looked into it, and there were relatively few cases of big AG suing small farmers over stuff like this. My understanding of one of the main cases that gets referenced in these discussions was where a farmer bought roundup ready seed, promised not to use it to breed, per standard EULA, then bred with it, and intentionally selected offspring to breed further which showed the roundup ready trait. Am I missing something?
by mikodin | 2026-01-22 02:33:17+00:00
I know you did this in a weekend, but it would be super nice to get some screenshots, or a video into what makes this different.

I also don't know what the "river/awesome philosophy" is, so therefore I don't know what this WM does that makes it different than something like Rectangle for example.

And truth be told, I'm not going to look it up. I am only adding this comment because I'm sure there will be a ton of other people that fall into the same category as me.

Good luck though, super cool to see that you built this in a weekend!
by chongli | 2026-01-22 02:34:06+00:00
I can understand it for casual users who just want something simple that works for basic tasks, but what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't, and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?

I consider myself a power user. What I don't consider myself is a "configuration hobbyist" which some people seem to conflate with power users. I use my Mac to get all kinds of work done. I write shell scripts and I have tons of 3rd party command line tools and open source software that I've installed via Homebrew. What I don't have is a customized desktop environment with power meter widgets and stock tickers in the menu bar and anime girl desktop backgrounds.

I used Linux for 10 years and I got tired of updates breaking things and having to edit configuration files just to get the system back to "normal." The Mac just gives me "normal" and loads of productivity (as well as battery life) out of the box, and it doesn't compromise on the command line power that I want.
by jmyeet | 2026-01-22 02:34:36+00:00
Capitalism. The problem is capitalism.

Any handouts for farmers go straight into the coffers of multinationals to pay for farm equipment, support for the locked down farm equipment, the patented seeds, the pesticides for the patented seeds and so on. The entire subsdization model is a profit opportunity for agricultural companies.

And what do those companies wnat to do? Buy up the farms and run them themselves for more profit. Because they don't have to charge the same amount to their own farms of course.

It's also why the wealthy and big companies like illegal immigration. It's an endless supply of underpaid workers who can be exploited for even more profits. Document these people and everybody's wages go up.

The only country I can think of that is really effectively managing its agriculture and food supply is of course China. China had some food shortages in the late 20th century and a result food security became a primary concern of the CCP. China has to feed 20% of the world's population and decided that food need to be plentiful and affordable. There were a seris of agricultural reforms through the 1970s to 1990s and then China used its increasing wealth to pay farmers when they had to and subsidize food when they had to to manage the supply. It's managed to the highest levels of China's government [1].

Here we have rent-seeking corporations and billionaires (eg the Resnicks [2]) where subsidies are just a wealth transfer to the already wealthy. food prices are out of control. But nobody cares because the profits have to keep going up.

[1]: https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-food-security-key-chall...

[2]: https://perfectunion.us/how-this-billionaire-couple-stole-ca...
by Loughla | 2026-01-22 02:35:01+00:00
It's not always about price. Paying farmers to grow nothing ensures they stay open if we need them to grow something.

When I farmed we had set aside land paid for by the government. When there were predicted shortages on food in the future, we were allowed to farm that ground.

You don't want farmers going under. It just takes one bad year that way and we're all fucked. I've never lived through a proper famine, but Grandpa talked about the dust bowl and depression. It sounded fucking awful.
by trhway | 2026-01-22 02:36:32+00:00
I'm sure their files have been paid necessary attention to deep inside some 3-letter agency. One hell of a coincidence:

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

"Louis Jolyon West—a LSD researcher involved in MKUltra—lived near the clinic, and was allowed by Smith to recruit clients for experiments.[7]"
by vineyardmike | 2026-01-22 02:36:50+00:00
Really depends on the details of your goals, but why not just VMs?

The "problem" with Pi-like devices is that they're usually not very "normal". The process of provisioning is different, IIRC they only "recently" supported booting off something other than the SD Card, and in the case of the Zeros, you'll either be using Wifi or an external USB Ethernet dongle (over USB OTG no less). Sometimes they need specially compiled version of linux, so you're stuck far from mainline (this was a big component of the RPis success) This may be distracting from your goals of learning about clustering.

I suspect the $10 Pi Zero is about as cheap as you'll get though, depending on your personal costs of case + ethernet dongle + USB power supply, etc.
by reillyse | 2026-01-22 02:37:04+00:00
Europe has a very robust, high quality and cheap food system.

Food is extremely high quality, environment is managed and wealth is distributed with support for small farmers.

High quality food is a fraction in Europe of what you pay in the US.

There is additional cost to taxpayers of Europe but US taxpayers are paying a ton for the US system too but just getting worse outcomes.

This can be done.
by GuB-42 | 2026-01-22 02:38:07+00:00
Software tools are not really tools like a knife. They are more like cooking recipes.

Traditionally, people don't pay for cooking recipes, they may pay for cookbooks, that is a nice packaging around the recipes, or they may keep their recipes secret. Cooking recipes are like the software tools of chefs.

The actual tools of developers are computers, which they pay for, like chefs pay for their knives.

Software tools, like recipes cost nothing to copy and distribute, while actual tools, like knives and computers cost money per unit to produce.
by mianos | 2026-01-22 02:38:15+00:00
If you want to do the same thing, build a cluster of complete machines, in a ligh-weight manner, just for the learning experience, you can use incus to create containers in the same manner.
As they are all complete machines and you bridge them, you get DHCP allocation identical to running a little PC on the local LAN. If you have ssh set up in the image, as described, you can run the identical scripts.

As a plus, if you run them on ZFS with de-dup, even the disk cost for new machines is miniscule.
by dylan604 | 2026-01-22 02:38:23+00:00
<devilsAdvocate>How many people spend time making their selections on the computer, then compare every single selection on the print out? Deniers could say the computer randomly prints votes to skew in certain candidate/party direction knowing not everyone would catch it.</devilsAdvocate>

all it would take is one person saying their printed ballot does not match their specific selection, and the whole thing would become chaos.
by gruez | 2026-01-22 02:38:42+00:00
>GFW has been able to filter SNI to block https traffic for a few years now.

SNI isn't really the threat here, because any commercial VPN is going to be blocked by IP, no need for SNI. The bigger threat is tell-tale patterns of VPN use because of TLS-in-TLS, TLS-in-SSH, or even TLS-in-any-high-entropy-stream (eg. shadowsocks).
by iamnothere | 2026-01-22 02:38:44+00:00
Errors in these other areas are typically reversible without undermining trust in electoral processes, leading to (in the worst case) wide scale violence and death.

We use the internet for too much, more systems should be airgapped. It’s a miracle that there hasn’t been a tragedy yet from a hack of critical infrastructure. Even things like water treatment and energy systems can be vulnerable: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/08/american-water-largest-us-wa...
by MartijnBraam | 2026-01-22 02:38:51+00:00
Linux from scratch is quite a lot of fun, did it a decade ago and learned how to bootstrap a linux system after installing Archlinux got boring. Never went past the initial "get a working" system stage though.

Now I'm building LFS/BLFS again but hacked the Alpine package manager into it to actually be able to install multiple machines with this and crossed the point where I'm daily driving it on my laptop
by knuit | 2026-01-22 02:39:09+00:00
I’m currently using a Yoto (3 devices) with my 1 and 4 year old and they thoroughly enjoy it. The MYO experience and loading up cards is pretty straightforward as well.

Love the concept here and I would be a customer if you were still offering lifetime, but with so many things going subscription nowadays adding another at $40/year just feels a bit on the higher side. Definitely understand how that assists with cash flow for ongoing development though.