MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by quilombodigital | 2026-01-22 02:39:38+00:00
In Brazil we have been using electronic voting for decades.

See, here we always had issues with corruption, and thats why we had to implement it.

The thing is that we always had major issues at the city level elections, because many small groups dominate different regions, and they just controlled the election officials, influenced voters, disappeared with ballot bags, and did all types of crazy stuff. It was pretty common at the eighties exchange votes for gas, dentures or even tubal ligation.

For all this reasons, a specific voting registry was created in 1985, and an electronic voting machine was used for the first time in municipal elections in 1995. This solved most issues, and elections started to be a lot easier, there was A LOT of confusion in the past. After it was available in all cities in the country, they started to do national elections.

The main idea here is that this is a government endeavour, not a private company. There are so many security layers that I think that only another external government actor would have resources to attack it.

These machines have special hardware, the encryption keys are loaded at the election day by the government, the machines are there only for the 8 hours of voting, then came back to a government deposit, they account for every machine, they are audited before and after, they randomly choose the election officials, the machine prints a receipt for the voter and the stats of votes of that machine. Each person has an election location and room/machine, so schools are used. If a machine has problems, they have to on the fly generate new keys for a substitution. In 2024 they used 570.000 machines at the election.

When the election day finishes, they place at the door of the room the machine receipts, so any ONG or international organization can verify. After it they take the machine to a central place where they connect to them and trasmit the data, and in one hour we know the president.
During these decades we had presidents from the right and from the left, and all cities and states, so you can say it works just by seeing all this power cycling all the time.

I agree with the article in the sense that we need paper confirmation, and that we cannot trust the voter machine, but I think Brazil solved this by making sure to control the machine, and printing receipts and making then available to any public organization.

I particularly think that only one thing is missing in this technology, technically speaking, I would like to have a personal key with an ecc key created by me, that would allow me to insert this card when voting, so it would encrypt my vote, store and send to the server, so I could, using my card (even online) check for my voting history, connecting all the endpoints. It is still anonymous, but verifiable by me.

More information here:
https://international.tse.jus.br/en/electronic-ballot-box/pr...
by IAmGraydon | 2026-01-22 02:40:22+00:00
> 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.

I have to admit, it's a bit disturbing that his reason for not doing it is because he might get "burned" or caught. How about...you know...because he believes in upholding democracy?
by nerdsniper | 2026-01-22 02:40:24+00:00
From a tech perspective, I do find myself occasionally having interesting discussions with co-founders about what it means to be operating our business in a legal environment where the rule of law is diminished. Startups have often had to contend with variance in enforcement and interpretation.

Some of my favorite historical examples of startups who had to worry about uncertain rule of law are:

- Aereo[0]: Who tried their very best to follow the law diligently but got slapped down anyways.

- Uber[1]: Who blatantly broke the law so callously that they relied on gaps in the rule of law to enable their business model.

- Kim Dotcom[2]: A German-born citizen who had never set foot inside USA's jurisdiction found himself arrested by the FBI in helicopters storming his home in New Zealand. This emphasized that any founder needs to follow US law, no matter where they are operating.

In each case, it seemed that whoever had more money tended to win, rather than who had the letter of the law on their side.

0: https://archive.md/PJHhD

1: https://archive.md/tqk3W

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Dotcom
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-22 02:40:42+00:00
> where only people of a certain character can work

Out of curiosity, could you expand on this? Gutting engineering playgrounds and other inefficient crap to maximize ROI sounds like a fun challenge. It's essentially performance optimization but applied to a whole infrastructure as opposed to individual parts.

Applied through the proverbial front door a few months back to have a chat and unsurprisingly got a generic rejection, but wouldn't mind trying again using a better channel. Question is of course whether they'd be willing to pay enough to make it worthwhile.
by Fezzik | 2026-01-22 02:41:50+00:00
Do you have a citation for voting by mail being demonstrable problematic? None of the things you describe are even true. We’ve been voting by mail in Oregon for decades and the demonstrated instances of voter fraud are effectively zero. The Heritage Foundation, which is opposed to vote by mail, has a great list here: https://electionfraud.heritage.org/search?state=OR.

I encourage you to click the ‘Read’ tab to see the actual circumstances resulting in the convictions as most are for trying to game ballot signatures and have nothing to do with votes being cast. It just doesn’t happen because the system is secure.

Never once has anyone, outside of their expansive imagination, proven that voting by mail is not secure and effective.
by iszomer | 2026-01-22 02:42:08+00:00
> "classification": "Clean / Neutral Low-Impact User",

Guess I don't have anything "impactful" to say on the platform even if it was an LLM hallucination as others (including Grok) have claimed.

> "..nothing matches this specific "OHI_V3" nomenclature or detailed structure -- it's essentially role-play or hallucinated output that's entertaining but not grounded in verified internals."
by fzeroracer | 2026-01-22 02:42:38+00:00
> 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.

Just to be clear, if you are actually telling the truth you have a fundamental duty to reveal the company in question and who is making these requests, as doing so can constitute a felony in many countries across the world. So I recommend you telling us where this is happening.
by autoexec | 2026-01-22 02:42:40+00:00
> If we can’t create a secure online voting system why do we use it for passports, banking, medical records, drivers licenses, criminal and law record keeping.

Hackers get into people's bank accounts, medical records, etc. all the time. We know that these systems are massively insecure. Also, none of those things are kept secret from everyone involved. Your bank gets to know how much you paid for something. Your doctor gets to know what your xray showed. The judge can see what court documents you filed. There are a lot of eyes on that data and trails to catch problems. Nobody is allowed to know how you vote. It's a very different problem than the online submission of bank transactions and court records.

There are also robust systems for correcting the record when something goes wrong. Sadly still not enough in place to protect the people whose data gets stolen or leaked, but that's another topic.
by msie | 2026-01-22 02:43:02+00:00
Well, I've been programming since 1986 and I had to buy all the compilers I used. For the Mac: Lightspeed Pascal, Lightspeed C and Metrowerks. I wish I had the money to buy MPW. Linux then was just a glint in Linus's eyes. We didn't have the internet with easy access to pirated software. I didn't do BB's so I don't know about that area. Once I went to uni in the 90's I started using Usenet but even then I didn't download any pirated software. Microsoft was virtually giving away Visual Studio/Visual Basic to University students. Back then I also remember reading Linus' arguments with Tanenbaum over microkernels and this funny language called Python and its creator unveiling/supporting it on Usenet. Around that time more and more tools were being offered for free and as a poor student I was delighted. Also we got access to free Unix tools since as we were doing work on Unix systems. Oh yeah, I remembered using this cool functional language called Miranda in one of my courses but was sad that it was a paid product. And then I heard about the debut of Haskell which was sort of a free answer to Miranda.
by icedchai | 2026-01-22 02:43:16+00:00
I've experimented with all those platforms, and macOS feels to me like "Unix" as much as a Sun SparcStation or SGI Indy from 30 years ago.

What is "Unix" to you? To me, it's the common shell commands / utilities and a POSIX API. If I can download some GNU source, run ./configure; make; make install ... it's Unix.

Certainly, macOS is a "weird" Unix if you compare it to Solaris and look at the administrative bits. But, then again, IBM's AIX is very weird, too. And that's one of the few commercial Unix implementations still kicking.
by jmyeet | 2026-01-22 02:44:10+00:00
You must be young because nobody who lived through his campaign would say that.

He was anti-war. In 2007-2008. Only a few years when the majority of Democrats voted in favor of the Iraqi War Resolution, something that helped sink Hilary Clinton's 2008 bid. He ran on universal healthcare. He ran on renewable energy. He ran on increased LGBTQ rights.

He won Iowa by 9 doing this. To a war hero. Kamala lost by 13. To a convicted felon who had a track record of screwing over farmers.
by Tiberium | 2026-01-22 02:44:44+00:00
I find such "X in Y lines of code" challenges not very interesting most of the time, because, as it is the case here, they usually just pack multiple lines into one instead of using clever tricks, from one of the lines in that file:

> right, left = lambda f: lambda x, y: list(map(lambda yi: f(x, yi), y)) if not atom(y) else f(x, y), lambda f: lambda x, y: list(map(lambda xi: f(xi, y), x)) if not atom(x) else f(x, y)
by runjake | 2026-01-22 02:44:50+00:00
Our computer policies:

- Force disables the firewall.

- Disables SSH key auth.

- Disables Touch ID.

- Disables FileVault.

- Disables software updates. I'm not sure if this is on purpose or the policy is broken. I get different answers, depending on who I ask.

- Sets up a service account with a weak password (cartoon character name plus two digit number)

- Removes admin for us

- Sets the wi-fi interface as the preferred interface, even if using ethernet.

- Gives full-time admin to the level 1 help desk staff despite our computers having boatloads of confidential data.

When it was Intel Macs, I had a secret exploit to disable the forced MDM that I kept secret as hell, but with the introduction of Apple Silicon Macs, that exploit went away.

No, none of this is a joke.
by More_Fee_Us | 2026-01-22 02:45:30+00:00
This paper introduces a constraint-based model that predicts the masses of Standard Model particles using zero free parameters. Instead of relying on adjustable constants, it encodes mass as exponential functions of a fixed 198-bit informational limit—derived from α⁻¹ / ln(2). The results match known particle masses with strong precision and suggest mass is a computational output of informational constraint.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-22 02:45:55+00:00
Let me guess - they don’t want to enforce equal time rule on Fox News or Twitter/X or Truth Social? So much for the right valuing free speech or private parties having the freedom to do what they want. To be clear, I don’t dispute the bias alleged in many of these shows. But I find this one sided enforcement to just be a shameless abuse of power.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-22 02:47:31+00:00
>do not want to say anything bad about universities

I'll make a slightly warm take: Co-opting our higher education institutions to be used as an extended job pipelne was a huge mistake. Your primary goal for attending college should not be to prepare for a job unless you are aiming for a highly specialized position.

Hotter take: jobs above a certain size should require a 3 month onboarding pipeline that is demonstrably used if they want to make the argument of hiring H1-B's. If you can learn the job in that period, it's clear that there is domestic talent.
by TheAdamist | 2026-01-22 02:47:43+00:00
Coming from the perspective of an eclipse fan, why is VS code the defacto answer nowadays?

Im forced to use vs code (so biased), but everything seems worse than eclipse, plus these repeated security issues from malware laced projects.

Theres been several posts about infected projects by fake recruiters here in the last year or two.

Im guessing the answer is probably Java is why eclipse is out of favor.
by Devont | 2026-01-22 02:47:49+00:00
Personally I think they launched their 1.0 prematurely. The community seems a bit mired in constant rewriting and immature tooling. Because this setup owns your whole stack, when they having a breaking change it ripples through the whole thing and your on the hook for that as a consumer (prob more so if they control your hosting). Someday they might reach a stable state, but for now if you don't want to bleed for them, I’d be weary.

(I think there are technical and marketing reasons to be weary of as well, but the degree to which that matters is application specific. The above is universal and will probably continue to be the case through at least a few more major revisions if I had to guess).
by ehnto | 2026-01-22 02:48:00+00:00
The country is filled with regular guns, legal and illegal, this seems like a really pointless avenue of restriction.

It's also already illegal to manufacture weapons without the required licenses, so if someone is okay breaking that law, they would probably be okay making their own 3D printer or CNC machine from the commodity parts they are made from.

What next, ban aluminium profile and stepper motors? Let's not forget hex head screws! I hear CNC machines have a lot of wiring, maybe they will ban the element copper.

All that to say, this would be both ineffective at changing the problem and extremely frustrating to law abiding citizens. Stifling innovation is one thing, squashing small businesses regular operations would be another outcome. CNC machines have been around for decades, powering small industries that have pumping out bespoke parts for years.
by elbasti | 2026-01-22 02:48:15+00:00
Voting is not a monolithic process. It's actually a combination of 3 things:

- How votes are cast

- How votes are counted

- How votes are custodied

In order for an election to be trusted, all three steps must be transparent and auditable.

Electronic voting makes all three steps almost absolutely opaque.

Here's how Mexico solves this. We may have many problems, but "people trust the vote count" is not one of them:

1. Everyone votes, on paper, in their local polling station. The polling station is manned by volunteers from the neighborhood, and all political parties have an observer at the station.

2. Once the polling station closes, votes are counted in the station, by the neighborhood volunteers, and the counts are observed by the political party observers.

3. Vote counts are then sent electronically to a central system. They are also written on paper and the paper is displayed outside the poll both for a week.

The central system does the total count, but the results from each poll station are downloadable (to verify that the net count matches), and every poll station's results are queryable (so any voter can compare the vote counts displayed on paper outside the station to the online results).

Because the counting is distributed, results are available night-of in most cases.

Elections like this can be gamed, but the gaming becomes an exercise in coercing people to vote counter to their preference, not "hacking" the system.
by autoexec | 2026-01-22 02:49:13+00:00
It depends on what "Voters can check their votes" means since you have to make sure that nobody can take a receipt to see which way someone (including themselves) voted. You're also still stuck trusting that what your receipt said matches what actually got counted.

The best paper record is the actual ballot you yourself marked and turned in. It shows exactly what the ballot said and it shows what your selection was. Counting of those ballots can take place in public, on camera to make sure that each vote gets counted correctly. No internet or computers needed.
by insane_dreamer | 2026-01-22 02:49:48+00:00
It's just shocking to me how certain demographics are so eager to vote against their own interests.

I mean, name one thing that Trump has done to help farmers more than he hurt them with the tariffs? (Subsidies they already had, regardless of the party in power.)

What are they getting in return for their vote? The safety of knowing that trans athletes are banned and some Guatemalans in far away "liberal" cities have been "gotten rid of"? None of those benefit them in any way. I still can't quite understand.
Show HN: Open-source multi-agent subtitle translator (self-hosted)
by mrqjr | 2026-01-22 02:49:58+00:00
I spent the past year solving a real problem: AI-translated subtitles are inconsistent—switching between formal and casual, character names changing mid-film, tone jumping around randomly.

Existing tools treat subtitles as isolated sentences. So I built a *multi-agent system* that works like a real translation team: a "director" creates a style guide for the entire film, a "glossary agent" enforces consistent terminology, and a "translator" works with context windows.

It works well. I've processed hundreds of hours of subtitles with it, and the quality beats most SaaS products I've tried.

Honestly, I originally wanted to build a SaaS. But getting a product noticed is hard—marketing, customer acquisition, support. As a solo developer, I don't have the resources of a big company or VC.

Rather than let this project die on my hard drive, I'm open-sourcing it so people who need it can deploy it themselves. At least this way, the time I spent isn't wasted, and it can help some people.

Three specialized agents work in sequence:
1. Director Agent - Reads the entire subtitle file and generates a style guide (tone, formality, addressing strategy). Uses long-context models to analyze the full script.

2. Glossary Agent - Extracts and enforces consistent terminology: character names (with gender inference for pronouns), locations, domain terms. Outputs a Markdown glossary embeddable in prompts.

3. Translator Agent - Uses a sliding window with bidirectional context:
- References previous translations (for coherence)
- Previews upcoming sentences (to avoid splitting errors)
- Strict format validation (preserves timing, IDs, structure)
- Batch processing for efficiency

4-6. Reviewer, Polisher, and Timing Adjuster agents are planned for Q1 2026.

Stack:
- .NET 10.0 + Microsoft Agents framework
- Subtitle Edit (libse) for parsing
- Multiple subtitle formats (auto-detection)
- Compact format to reduce token usage
- Configurable LLM endpoints (OpenAI-compatible, Gemini, etc.)
- Model strategy: Long-context for Director/Glossary, cost-effective for translation

Status:
[Y]Core pipeline (steps 1-3) is production-ready and open source
[Y]Monolingual translation works
[Y]Bilingual subtitle support available
Steps 4-6 Before Q2 2026
Windows/macOS/Web UI planned for May 2026
by bayarearefugee | 2026-01-22 02:50:28+00:00
It is completely unsurprising that this is happening.

It will be completely unsurprising that despite a "strongly worded letter" it will continue to happen and there will be no consequences despite the unconstitutionality.

The US Government and the very idea of a rule of law here are hopelessly broken and there is no obvious peaceful path to ever fixing it.
by enginhackernews | 2026-01-22 02:50:51+00:00
Run the REPL

./scripts/kleis repl
Kleis REPL v0.1.0
λ> :load examples/control/eigenvalues.kleis
Loaded

λ> :verify ∀(x : ℝ, y : ℝ). x + y = y + x
Valid
Run in Jupyter

cd kleis-notebook
pip install -e .
python -m kleis_kernel.install
jupyter notebook
example "eigenvalues" {
let A = Matrix([[1, 2], [3, 4]]) in
out(eigenvalues(A))
}
Output:

┌ ┐
│ 5.37228 │
│-0.37228 │
└ ┘
by all2 | 2026-01-22 02:51:34+00:00
Hello all,

My name is Albert and I built this statechart engine to scratch my own itch. I work with embedded systems and in an environment where process is paramount. My current employer has a number of certifications that require semi-annual audits of process, paperwork, etc.

I kept reaching for tools I knew about (python-statemachine in particular) in order to solve process problems, but nothing really scratched the itch; I needed an engine that took declarative workflows that were versionable and more importantly, not a part of the core runtime. I want to be able to push/pull/up/down workflows the same way I do docker containers. I want those workflows to expose API endpoints and webhooks so I can interface with them in a variety of ways (UI, test completions, ECO/ECR flows involving people, and so on).

This library is a foundational piece of that puzzle; it gives me a relatively performant statechart execution engine that I can build my dream app on top of.

It consists of two runtimes: an event driven runtime, and a tick-based runtime. The event driven runtime does not make guarantees about event execution order for parallel states, where the tick-based system does. The tick based runtime is single-threaded on purpose, in order to guarantee event evaluation order, which makes it deterministic.

As an aside, I plan on building out a number of demos using this engine in the coming weeks. Amongst the demo ideas are: an AI agentic pipeline doing something arbitrary, like research (because why not), a simple game engine integration where the tick-based runtime takes the place of 'system' in an entity-component-system architecture, and probably an http server implementation just for kicks.

Thanks for taking a look!

---

Oh, and here are some benchmarks for the alpha release:

StatechartX Benchmarks (i5-5300U, 4 cores, Linux)

Runtime Burst Sustained Latency Queue Allocs
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Realtime (1000Hz) 15.05M/s ~6.1M/s 279 µs 10K 0
Core - Simple 8.86M/s 8.86M/s ~83 ns 100K 0
Core - Internal 12.08M/s 12.08M/s ~83 ns 1K 0
Core - Concurrent 4.00M/s 4.00M/s ~83 ns 10K 0
Core - Parallel 3.69M/s 3.69M/s ~83 ns 100K 0
Core - Hierarchical 3.41M/s 3.41M/s ~83 ns 100K 0
Core - Guarded 3.01M/s 3.01M/s ~83 ns 100K 0

Memory: 32KB/machine | Zero allocations under load | Graceful backpressure

Event-driven: burst = sustained (constant, predictable)
Tick-based: burst > sustained (15M submit, 6.1M process)
by torton | 2026-01-22 02:51:35+00:00
Even the most cursory research into mail-in voting shows a number of safeguards designed into the process; one summary can be found at https://responsivegov.org/research/why-mail-ballots-are-secu.... Instances of mail based voting fraud are extremely rare despite the extremely high motivation of some actors (such as the current US federal leadership) to find any evidence to the contrary.