MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jasonwatkinspdx | 2026-03-11 21:02:30+00:00
On the US keep in mind elections are run at the state level and below, so we don't have a single voting system, we have 50+.

My state, Oregon, for example uses a very straightforward vote by mail system. They ask if you wanna register to vote when you get/update your drivers license or state id. Your ballot just comes in the mail, you fill it out, send it back. For folks that lack a permanent address or similar, you can get provisional ballots at libraries and similar city offices. The provisional ballots make you fill out enough information to check if you're allowed to vote.

It's simple, convenient, secure, and efficient.

So why don't more states do it this way?

Unfortunately there's a long ugly history of using all sorts of dirty tricks for voter suppression in the US, in particular to keep Jim Crow going. And unfortunately variations of that continue today. I don't have the energy to dig into it fully here, I just want any international readers to be aware there's a whole lot of utterly craven bad faith when it comes to discussions around voting fraud and security in the US.
by zahlman | 2026-03-11 21:02:43+00:00
It's completely normal here. People get federally mandated time off to go vote; 3 hours IIRC, which is way more than would ever ordinarily be necessary (and polling stations are open well past typical work hours). I typically walk a few minutes from home, and never experience a significant lineup.

Relying on the postal service here would make it much worse, honestly.
by floatrock | 2026-03-11 21:02:43+00:00
Bots will absolutely infiltrate them eventually, but I think it's the only solution.

Internet promised ability to connect with anyone anywhere around the world. It felt limitless and infinite.

Turns out in an infinite world, the loudest voices are the ragebaits, the algorithmically-amplified, or the outright scammers.

Human social brain doesn't work in an infinite world, it works for a Dunbar's Number world. And we all like our psuedo-anonymous soapboxes (I'm standing on one right now), but trick will be to realize that the glitter of infinite quantity isn't the same as small-scale connection.
by phs318u | 2026-03-11 21:02:45+00:00
> Language is a tool

While this is true, it is not just a tool. Or, I should say it’s a tool with far greater utility than just winning an argument or making a localised point. Language is how we think, and the ability to reason well is absolutely dependent on our skill with language.

Language is the mark of humanity in the sense that how else can I convey to you a fragment of my inner state? My emotions, my feelings, my desires. The language of poetry and literature. That which sparks an emotional response in another.

Dumbing down language is dumbing down period.
by WarmWash | 2026-03-11 21:02:45+00:00
Just speaking honestly

This rule actually says "Don't admit when you are using AI to generate comments and don't admit when you are an AI"

I know it's cynical, but this is as meaningful as reddit's "upvote/downvote is not an agree/disagree or like/dislike button"

People may hate that this is true, but I cannot logically reason out how a rule like this could work. I think it's better to just accept that AI is now part of the circle, until we can figure out a "human check".
by righthand | 2026-03-11 21:02:48+00:00
I don’t think people are going to get offline and the best we can probably do is create free and open p2p platforms that don’t require registration necessarily to use. And allow people to control their own databases. A lot of communication is locked behind corporations that run the services that are building these tracking and identification databases.

I actually think it’s more about getting people off browsers and other tracking software.
by IX-103 | 2026-03-11 21:03:06+00:00
No other country is quite as heterogeneous as the US. And there is a significant history in the US of using restrictions around voting to disenfranchise certain ethnicities. That makes any restriction around voting a sensitive topic in the US.

Proponents of voter ID claim it is needed to prevent fraud, while opponents point out that there's not enough fraud for it to be worth the cost.

Note that countries such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand also didn't require voter ID. First-world countries that do require ID to vote have systems in place to ensure that getting that ID is easy even for poorer people - such as automatically sending the ID to the voter by mail if the government requires you to report your residence or filing out the necessary forms once, before turning 18.
by ffsm8 | 2026-03-11 21:03:14+00:00
If you had the LLM write the comment, then it wasn't your thoughts.

I sometimes wonder if people aren't forgetting why we're on this platform.

The goal is to have an interesting discourse and maybe grow as a human by broadening your horizon. The likelihood of that happening with llms talking for you is basically nil, hence... Why even go through the motion at that point? It's not like you get anything for upvotes on HN
by bell-cot | 2026-03-11 21:03:39+00:00
At least from CNN's story, it seems unclear whether this was an attack by a known pro-Iran group, with an "in retaliation for killing schoolgirls" tagline. Or an attack by some unknown group(s), with such a tagline.

Given how many hacking groups don't like the US, the latter would tell us almost nothing about the attackers' actual identities and objectives.
by altairprime | 2026-03-11 21:03:58+00:00
If you discuss an idea with an AI and then close the AI window, turn to an editor, and write what the AI said from memory, that’s going to come across as AI-assisted writing and be unwelcome here.

If you discuss an idea with AI, then close the window and write a post about how you came up with the idea, got stuck, decided to ping an AI for unstuck-ness, describe how the AI’s response got you unstuck, and then continue writing about your idea, that’s not going to be necessarily treated as AI-assisted writing — but people are going to be extremely suspicious of you, because the perception is that 99.9% of people who use chatbots go on to submit AI-assisted writing. That’s probably more like 90% in reality but it’s something to be aware of as you talk about your experiences.

If you use AI in your process and don’t disclose it when writing about your idea and process, that’s generally viewed as lying-by-omission and if egregious enough you could end up downvoted, flagged, and/or banned (see also the recent video game awards / AI usage affair). Better to disclose it with due care than to hide it.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-03-11 21:04:02+00:00
> Am I here to read authentic humans because I value authenticity for its own sake (like preferring Champagne instead of sparkling wine)?

Mate, Champagne is a sparkling wine. In French you can even at times hear people asking for "un vin mousseux de Champagne" meaning "a sparkling wine from Champagne" instead of the short form (just saying "un Champagne" or "du Champagne").

Now, granted, not all sparkling wine are Champagne.

The Wikipedia entry begins with: "Champagne is a sparkling wine originated and produced in the Champagne wine region of France...".

I drank enough of it to be stating my case, of which I'm certain!

P.S: and btw, yup, authentic humans content only here, even if it's of "low quality". If I want LLM, I've got my LLMs.
by password54321 | 2026-03-11 21:04:11+00:00
This guys account currently sits on negative karma with this post:

>It's kind of crazy when someone has an outlier experience and then tries to frame an entire country as being that way.
I've experienced a lot of cultures, countries, and environments. The United States is KNOWN for being a friendly country of people who will talk to you and smile at you for "no reason" other than because Americans are friendly.

Go to many countries in Europe or even Russia, you'll experience the exact oppositive. If you smile at people or talk to a stranger, you will essentially be treated as if something is wrong with you.

Everyone knows this is true about the US. Your comment is clearly trying to portray the United States in a negative light with something that is entirely not true.

And then there's my experience: someone who has lived in the US for over 30+ years.

Troll or a weirdo.
by t0mas88 | 2026-03-11 21:04:15+00:00
While this sounds like it allowed remote voting, it's interesting that some places (e.g. The Netherlands) went back to 100% paper instead of voting machines. That causes counting to take quite some time, with estimates/interim counts in between.

I don't understand why voting machines can't just print your vote on a piece of paper behind a plastic window for you to see while also recoding the vote in a database. That is 100% anonymous and can't be cheated. The database is the instant answer at election closing time, and then you can take some days to count the papers as confirmation that nothing weird happened.

No way to hack that. If you print something different on the paper the voter will see it. If you try to hack it by printing more papers than actual votes, the paper count won't match the amount of voting passes that you collected/verified when letting people into the polling station.

It may even be safer than the current paper approach, because if the paper vote counters try to cheat their counts won't match the database triggering an investigation as well.
by duped | 2026-03-11 21:04:29+00:00
There's also the chance it's not a weapon, but something that mistakenly turned into a weapon when it was tested on live subjects.

I don't think randomly attacking embassy staff (iirc, not everyone was CIA - there were just desk people affected) makes sense for anyone to do, but trying to listen on them and fucking up sounds right up their (or our) alley.
by saphalpdyl | 2026-03-11 21:04:36+00:00
My access edge is injecting DHCP Option 82, and I'm mapping customers based on (bng_id + circuit_id + remote_id ). Say, a customer on Oakwood Drive ABC wants a service. What is the process of finding the right circuit between storing the customer's desired address and finding the best circuit to connect it to? Since, as mentioned in this thread, having connected to a wrong circuit can cause network noise for other customers too, how is the "cleanest" circuit + port assigned to a customer in a location ?
by Terr_ | 2026-03-11 21:04:48+00:00
> won't even entertain the thought of them existing

Careful, it's also possible that they have thought very hard about such things, and they've decided that revealing what they know would lose them a technological edge.

In other words, what if the CIA/DOD already knows there's a class of devices which could explain the problems, and the denial is about maintaining secrecy over their own operational capabilities?

Imagine something similar in the 1980s: "This tragic mid-air collision was obviously caused by faulty radar or gross pilot error by at least one of the two military planes... Our brightest minds have looked very hard at the problem and there is no such thing as a 'stealth' airplane which doesn't show up on radar."
Show HN: An offline-first expense tracker on Cloudflare D1 and SQLite WASM
by momentmaker | 2026-03-11 21:04:50+00:00
I built pancakemaker for myself as a dead-simple personal expense tracker that works fully offline and syncs when you're back online.

The core idea: SQLite runs in the browser via WASM as the local store, and Cloudflare D1 handles cloud sync — no traditional backend needed.

The whole stack is serverless-edge (Cloudflare Workers + D1), so it's cheap to run and fast to deploy. I wanted something I'd actually use daily without worrying about yet another SaaS subscription.

Would love feedback on the sync approach and whether the WASM-first architecture holds up in practice.
by spiddy | 2026-03-11 21:05:17+00:00
you don’t need to be an aviation expert to trust the plane will fly.

likewise e-voting systems pass through cryptography experts auditing to verify it does what it says it does.

said that the voting solution can also provide cryptographic proof that your vote was unaltered, and accounted for, without need to expose your actual vote.

the claims about database altering, are also false as the vote is cryptographically signed and unalterable.

also there is another feature where you can recast vote on top of your previous one and the last vote will be the valid one. This is crucial for countries where the bad guys can come at your place and under distress (gun) force your vote. you can then recast safely invalidating the forced vote.

e-voting solutions is really interesting and in an alternate reality I think we could have had a mainstream e-voting and more even direct-democracy vs our current democracy by proxy (elected officials)
by adeltoso | 2026-03-11 21:05:23+00:00
I've been experimenting with AI coding tools daily for the past year with a small engineering team (all senior 15+, FAANG backgrounds). Wrote down everything we learned, the parts that worked and the parts that didn't.

Some things that surprised us:

- AI is slower than writing code yourself on any single task. The win is not speed, it's parallelism. We made our dev environments duplicable and now work on multiple PRs simultaneously.

- AI is dramatically better on clean code than on technical debt. It's like a mirror that shows you how much chaos you've been tolerating.

- Out of the box tools give mediocre results. We invested heavily in configuration (20 AGENTS.md files, 6,553 lines total) and in augmenting the agent with skills: typechecking, test runners, read-only access to tickets, logs, Sentry. The agent self-debugs and fetches its own context now.

- Never trust the output. We built a pr-reviewer agent whose only job is to criticize code changes against the original specs. Strongly typed languages help enormously here, the compiler is your cheapest AI reviewer.

- Mental context-switching is the new must-have skill for engineers. You orchestrate, the AI executes (for now).

Would love to hear what's working for other teams, I'm sure our approach is not the only one.
by amiantos | 2026-03-11 21:05:24+00:00
Why is it being called dead internet theory when, as far as I can tell, what's really happening is that big centralized systems are being overrun with bots? The internet existed and was pretty great before these large centralized systems came into being.

Anyone can still run a blog/website, and/or their own discourse server. There's no need to mourn for these centralized systems that largely existed only to exploit us in some way. Let's celebrate "small internet theory", an internet where exploitation is effectively impossible because every company that tries it is overrun with AI bots. That sounds awesome to me personally, but I was also up late last night watching clips of Conan O'Brien from 1999 and the nostalgia for that era / what the internet was like back then hit me so hard it was almost painful.
by danebalia | 2026-03-11 21:05:25+00:00
How it works
It starts from the moment you fire up your coding agent. As soon as it sees that you're building something, it doesn't just jump into trying to write code. Instead, it steps back and asks you what you're really trying to do.

Once it's teased a spec out of the conversation, it shows it to you in chunks short enough to actually read and digest.

After you've signed off on the design, your agent puts together an implementation plan that's clear enough for an enthusiastic junior engineer with poor taste, no judgement, no project context, and an aversion to testing to follow. It emphasizes true red/green TDD, YAGNI (You Aren't Gonna Need It), and DRY.

Next up, once you say "go", it launches a subagent-driven-development process, having agents work through each engineering task, inspecting and reviewing their work, and continuing forward. It's not uncommon for Claude to be able to work autonomously for a couple hours at a time without deviating from the plan you put together.

There's a bunch more to it, but that's the core of the system. And because the skills trigger automatically, you don't need to do anything special. Your coding agent just has Superpowers.
Show HN: HDC-based function caller ranks #2 on BFCL V4 – $2.08 vs. Opus at $87
by timmetime | 2026-03-11 21:05:28+00:00
I've been building Glyphh, a hyperdimensional computing runtime, for two years. This is the first HDC-based entry on the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard (BFCL V4), to my knowledge.
The idea: LLMs run at build time to generate intent exemplars. At runtime, function routing is pure HDC vector math — sub-ms, zero tokens, deterministic. Claude Haiku handles argument extraction only. The model code is fully open source.
Results: 74.50% overall (#2 behind Opus), 83.30% agentic (best on board, beating Opus), 88.71% non-live AST (top 3). Total eval cost: $2.08. Opus runs the same eval at $87 (results not yet verified by bfcl team).
The README is transparent about where it struggles (multi-turn: 53.75%) and where the LLM does the work vs HDC. There's also an independent code review in the repo. Happy to answer anything about the architecture (https://glyphh.ai)
by Molitor5901 | 2026-03-11 21:05:29+00:00
I think that dormant accounts, where someone has not logged in for, say, 2 years, does not post, does not engage, should be repurposed - with given notice. It's kind of the equivalent of cybersquatting. Also, technically, a platform is within its right to do this. I think the better course of action is to utilize the account. Gmail has made this clear that if you don't log into an account after some time they will repurpose it.
by apaprocki | 2026-03-11 21:05:37+00:00
Depending on the situation, the data lives either within the browser or within the OS. Chrome releases ship versions of tzdata that correspond to the version of tzdata shipped with the ICU it uses, and they do backport updates to prior Chrome releases within a certain window. Apple has a sideband way of deploying tzdata to all devices that doesn't appear via the normal Software Update mechanism. So it all depends on which particular OS/browser combo you're interested in and the decisions those owners made.
by sheept | 2026-03-11 21:05:54+00:00
I think that it's nice it's explicit that the method returns the current instant, rather than some other zero value.

There's also other methods that return other types, like

const now = Temporal.Now.instant()

which isn't as bad.

One could argue that the ugliness of the API intentionally reveals the ugliness of datetime. It forces you to really think about what you mean when you want "the current date time," which I think is one of the goals of the API.
by zahlman | 2026-03-11 21:05:58+00:00
> Many people don't have IDs and it is an onerous process to get one.

I have seen this constantly claimed, and never reasonably evidenced. It's also hard to believe the kind of American exceptionalism that supposedly causes these problems that everyone else can easily solve, despite an environment that is clearly heavily politically invested in solving it (because that also avoids the appearance of racism).

Meanwhile, American proponents of voter ID can readily find people including among the supposedly discriminated-against groups who will testify to the contrary.
by laffOr | 2026-03-11 21:05:59+00:00
I never understood why they didn't use the Apple "UI". Where Apple presents fewer models (say N models), and when you select one, each is configurable for screen size/RAM/CPU/whatever (say K picks), yielding N*K possibilities, many Windows laptop sellers present a list of N*K SKUs where you need to triple check what the difference between SKU A and B.
by keeda | 2026-03-11 21:06:04+00:00
If the intellectual property can be captured inside an LLM that is cheaper, tireless, compliant, not demanding, does not require HR, and will not jump to a competitor for higher pay, why would capital owners look at SWEs as assets?

You could say LLMs can't "keep intellectual property in their heads", but even today they don't need to. They just need to capture everything in a bunch of artifacts -- code, docs, spreadsheets, etc. -- which is already possible. The same things we do but to a limited extent because we're human. LLMs, being tireless, can do so with much more meticulous detail. Whatever an LLM cannot do can be done by a fraction of the workforce.

Yes, enlightened companies used to value their engineers, but the calculus has shifted. Look around -- layoffs, RTO mandates, AI mandates, offshoring, under-leveling, record levels of burnout -- even before AI has been widely adopted! The tech industry overall is been telling us what their stance is with their actions louder than any amount of perks or "we are all family" ever could.

It's not "because capital owners BAD", it's just "because Capitalism."

Our primary edge at this point is creativity and innovation that creates new intellectual property. I think that will be safe for a while, but that requires a pretty high level of skill and experience, which excludes a majority of the workforce. This is where I suspect a lot of pain will be felt.
by malfist | 2026-03-11 21:06:25+00:00
Amusingly your comment carries some of the tropes of AI authorship ("is not a problem on it's own....is the problem") but it's not shaped like a profound insight is being discovered in every line is what makes it human.

How much of AI writing will pass under the radar when the big companies aren't all maximizing to generate the most engagement hacking content in a chatbot UI? Maybe it'll still stand out for being low quality, but I'm not sure. There's lots of low quality human authored content.

Not sure where my comment is going, I just kinda rambled.
by Adiqq | 2026-03-11 21:06:48+00:00
Isn't the whole point to understand? If the task is to write and you expect only final result, but you question if it looks legit enough, how is it fair judgement? People can deliver partial results and show progress as well, but you won't see it in some comments on the internet, but if something is expected to take many days, it's easy to show different stages of work. It's easy to accuse people of plagiarism or not thinking for themselves, and of course there are indicators when someone uses AI, but the problem is that you can't distinguish in reliable way, if something was created by AI or not.

Like, there is this computer game, authors used some models or something like that, generated by AI, but it was only used during prototyping and later it was replaced by proper models. No one would know about that, if authors would not tell about it. So, if someone writes in their own words what AI generated for him, is it still argument made by human or by AI? What if someone uses AI only as placeholder and replaces all that content, so you never actually see actual AI usage, but it was used in the process?

For me, premise that using AI in any form invalidates your work, starts with logical fallacy, so such arguments against using AI are weak. It's like saying that your work is wrong, because you used calculator, so your calculations can't be right, if done by machine, because it had to make mistake or that's wrong for ethical reasons or whatever.

Work generated by AI can be easily poor, because these models make mistakes and like to repeat in certain ways, but is it wrong that I'm writing comment with keyboard, instead of writing letters with pen? Is it wrong, when I use IDE or some CLI to write code with AI, instead of using vim and typing everything on my own? Is it wrong that someone uses spell-checking?

In the end it doesn't matter who seems smarter, when you're expected to use AI at work. Reality shows you actual expectations.
by beautiful_apple | 2026-03-11 21:06:56+00:00
I've worked on some research in this area as well (the experience of people with verifiability systems in real-world elections)

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-43756-4_...

Beyond this paper, based on my experience working with election officials, political candidates, and voters, I would agree that verifiability is not well understood.