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"I am not saying ambient scribes are bad technology."

is this a counterpoint? he just seems to be wary of the risk, without a firm position and decided to personally stop using it. people often overestimate their own skills and think their own charting is better than that of others, that doesn't mean the tech doesn't work.


Since this is relevant to many HN comments, copy-pasted the charges from the pdf indictment in the linked page:

Count 1 - Unlawful Use of Confidential Government Information for Personal Gain

Count 2 - Theft of Nonpublic Government Information

Count 3 - Commodities Fraud

Count 4 - Wire Fraud

Count 5 - Engaging in a Monetary Transaction in Property Derived from Specified Unlawful Activity


> Count 5 - Engaging in a Monetary Transaction in Property Derived from Specified Unlawful Activity

For a moment there I read this as the unlawful activity was Maduro's arrest, and someone made money on that fact.


Maduro's kidnapping was unlawful.

As an aside, I thought the BBC telling it's "journalists" not to call it a kidnapping was the most hilarious thing to come from this:

https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/2026/01/05/bbc-maduro-v...

> “Kidnapping” is an uncomfortable word. It suggests force, illegality and wrongdoing. “Captured” sounds more respectable. It belongs to the language of war. “Seized” sounds calmer still — almost administrative, like someone found it on a supermarket shelf.


Reminds me of the far left calling rioting "unrest" when it's their guys doing the damage.

Be curious about what conservative and liberal media agree on, within that intersection are the only lies that actually matter.

Most kidnappings are...

Forgot the /s

Well, the supreme court has already given Trump full immunity for things like this, so they could easily label it a crime and start charging anyone involved they don't like. What you described sounds hilarious and crazy right now, but I fully expect something like this to happen eventually while the US further descends into fascism.

Huh that’s interesting. The sycophants in DC seem to be able to do everything listed here with no repercussions.

> sycophants in DC

Who? Because if you have evidence of military secrets being leaked through prediction markets, we actually need that journalistic record maintained.


I don't think the parent mentioned military secrets in particular? But the insider trading is already well documented e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cge0grppe3po

> the insider trading

The suspect hasn't been charged with insider trading. (OP said those "in DC seem to be able to do everything listed.")


> The suspect hasn't been charged with insider trading.

I think that was the point GP was making.


Pretty sure Count 1 through 5 above cover insider trading by administration officials too.

I think 3 and 4 are frauds on others in the prediction market agreement. As in, it’s fraud against the terms of the market.

The problem is "insider trading" has a definition and acting based on knowledge of government secrets isn't what it is.

And what I am saying is that the same articles of prosecution as in the soldier's case are applicable for their case too. Not going after them is a choice.

IANAL but what you state seems to literally fall under the STOCK Act of 2012. It is one kind of insider trading.

I don't know who, but there are a lot of news articles about high volume oil trading activities shortly before publicly military action.

There's plenty of evidence of it happening, if you consider the odds of surges of pre-market trading of oil futures 20 minutes before Trump tweets on Iran happening coincidentally. The actual finding of who's who has to be done by the U.S. law enforcement, who aren't really interested.

> plenty of evidence of it happening

There is circumstantial evidence. We need to collate that. But nothing trumps direct evidence. If someone has that I will bend over backwards to find a way to securely connect them with, at the very least, a reporter who can document it so it shows up in an internet search when an empowered staffer starts down this path.


The problem with this administration is that what you're saying will eventually happen. It will come out they were trading on this. And not a damned thing will happen.

> not a damned thing will happen

This is more lazy nihilism. Fortunately, it remains a minority view.


You don’t think the Trump admin leaked any secrets at all? No chats on signal? Nothing like that?

Hey hey now - the occasional $200? $250? fine is devastating enough on our selfless, dedicated, public servants!

It's interesting they don't think they can get him for leaking classified information. To me that seems like the biggest issue--I mean sure, it's bad he made money on it, but it would have been really bad if he'd gotten someone killed by blabbing to the internet.

did he leak the information, or just speculate on it? is it leaking classified info when pentagon officials order lots of pizza and thus inform the world that a military operation is being planned?

"A military operation is being planned" is very different from "Maduro will be kidnapped in the next x hours".

"Pentagon planning a military operation" is not exactly classified information as it is safe to assume that Pentagon is always planning a military operation.


did anyone have any reason to believe that was classified information that was leaked, instead of just a random person speculating? if not, then he had no intent to leak that information. If a random soldier told you, "iran will be nuked tomorrow" do you believe them? especially on a speculation platform, for all you know he's also guessing based on the same activites and events the public is observing. laws are all about intent and state of mind, what actually happened is irrelevant, what was intended is what matters. For example, killing a person is not a crime in and of itself, if it was all soldiers who kill someone in combat would be in prison, as would people who kill in self-defense. Matter of fact, if no classified information was actually leaked, but it could be proved that he intended to do something to leak classified info (which requires others to believe it is truthful information, instead of speculation) then that in itself is a crime.

Saying anything at all on a speculation platform, especially if others don't even know your identity (or you have no reason to believe they do), can only be treated as speculative intent, not intent to disclose classified information.


Yes, it seems in this case an adversary who was paying attention could have learned something very, very valuable.

Yes. Especially if the casino (or "prediction market") has access to the identities of players via id verification, fingerprinting, or other means.

You mean any non crypto payment system? :)

Going to guess that anyone in the U.S. military has their crypto wallet aggresively profiled by various spy agencies.

And literally every other thing they do on the internet.. remember that Strava shit? You have relatively technically unsophisticated people with high level access and not a lot of adult supervision. That seems like a juicy target. I assume there are a lot of well funded and staffed outifts around the world who have noticed the same thing.

There have been some cases where fitness tracker data shows where some military installations are located. Or when they're jogging on a ship that's taking them to deployment somewhere.

The Ukraine war has shown that cheap intelligence tricks can be used against the average recruit, like pretending to be a dating website and getting the GPS locations of horny enemy soldiers so your drones can drop grenades on them.

It doesn't need to be crypto wallet tracking. The amount of spyware being built into phone apps is where those agencies would be putting some effort into obtaining access to.


> "A military operation is being planned" is very different from "Maduro will be kidnapped in the next x hours".

IIRC, the bet was on "Nicolas Maduro out?":

> If Nicolás Maduro leaves office before February 1, 2026, then the market resolves to Yes.

So the bet wasn't specifically "Nicolas Maduro kidnapped?" or even "Nicolas Maduro out by January 3rd?" And IIRC there was a lot of Trump saber rattling about Venezuela in the days before, hence the creation of the bet. I could absolutely see a plausible way to link these publicly-available pieces of information into a winning bet:

* Trump talking tough about Venezuela

* Spike in DC pizza activity on January 2nd


The site that he bought the crypto from to make a bet could trace it back to him, and many, if not all, crypto trading sites have shady ties with some governemnts around the world.

Well, a lot of people got killed this way, too.

But from the perspective of the US DoJ the right people got killed (assuming of course they've determined the operation was legal according to their own rules, e.g. US law). The issue here is this guy telegraphed operational plans to the entire world which could have gotten (from the DoJ's perspective) the wrong people killed.

If that happened, could they retroactively classify it?

Maybe I'm making an incorrect assumption, but I assumed the information was already classified. He was betting on an outcome of a planned military operation based on his knowledge of those plans. My assumption is that information is super closely guarded, and likely classified at a high level. Telegraphing your invasion plans is generally not something you do unless you want disaster, right?

Yeah the DoJ proclaims,

“Our Office will continue to hold accountable those who misuse confidential or classified information in a way that undermines and exploits our national security.”

But isn’t wire fraud harder to prove than leaking classified facts?


> But isn’t wire fraud harder to prove than leaking classified facts?

No. From the Justice Department's own criminal resource manual:

> the four essential elements of the crime of wire fraud are:

> (1) that the defendant voluntarily and intentionally devised or participated in a scheme to defraud another out of money;

> (2) that the defendant did so with the intent to defraud;

> (3) that it was reasonably foreseeable that interstate wire communications would be used; and

> (4) that interstate wire communications were in fact used

https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...

Generally, to be successfully prosecuted for a crime, the prosecutor has to show that each and every "element" of the crime has to have happened. On the above page, there were 3 different court precedents who ruled what elements that the prosecutor needed to prove were in those cases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Element_(criminal_law)#


Unless the prosecution can prove that the trades meaningfully moved the market prices, it's probably going to be really hard to use the term "leaking".

I can't shake the feeling that there may be political reasons to not even attempt that angle. What legal precedent would it set if a judge actually ruled on that and the prosecution won? Which entities within the government would be financially inconvenienced?


So in prediction markets I've heard a lot of times people will collaborate in order to make certain predictions pay off higher sums by having more people put money on a certain bet.

Is it true with these markets the more people bet on a specific day and time, the value will increase more, increasing the overall payout? If that is true, I wonder if they're looking at anybody else helping place the bets or a group of people trying to wager a higher amount of money to increase the return?


It's a bit more nuanced than that, because we're not talking about outright market manipulation. Absent any other information, the market makers always assume that they might be trading against a better informed counterparty - so absent any other signal, the prices at which executions happen are themselves a signal.

Think about it: you have N market makers offering both sides of the trade with a spread between them. When there is no other meaningful activity, the best prices are more or less stable. Now someone comes in and buys one side of the trade. Each marker maker will, individually, make the same two decisions:

    1. "If you bought at that price, I should raise my price and charge you more"
    2. "Since you bought at that price, I must assume you have more information and I should get out the way to avoid an expensive mistake"
The magnitude of the decisions made depends on various factors, but as a short-hand the size of the made trades in respect to the overall liquidity available near the midpoint directs how strongly the market makers react. A tiny trickle of insignificant trades does not move the price in any meaningful way (unless the sizes are so small that the execution commission starts to make a difference). A sustained directional flood of trades will cause the midpoint (and volume) to move to the direction where the market makers can sell at higher prices and avoid accumulating any further losses.

Well yes. Someone has the other side of the bet, and it’s not 1:1 long:short. That’s how folks could hypothetically hire somebody to kill me, by putting $5M on “floam will survive the month” - if I’m not killed conspirators get their money back, with interest. But if I am verifiably dead, whoever knew in advance a hit man will kill me, that man gets paid.

It seems strange, but that must be why I'm not a lawyer :p

You’re just seeing, clearly, the priorities of the US.

Is it helping sick citizens? No. Is it feeding the hungry? No. Free education, housing the un housed or protecting the environment? No, no , no.

To be perfectly clear, it’s not giving vets the benefits they deserve or keeping soldiers safe either.

Money. The priority is money.

Getting it. And making sure those that don’t have it don’t get it.


The government is very big. They can have multiple priorities. The Dept of Justice does not provide medical care, education, or anything else you listed -- they prosecute crimes. And using classified military plans for personal gain while potentially putting fellow soldiers at risk seems like a crime that is worth prosecuting.

God money's not looking for the cure God money's not concerned about the sick among the pure God money, let's go dancing on the backs of the bruised God money's not one to choose No, you can't take it No, you can't take it No, you can't take that away from me

Count 3, how is this a commodity?

Count 1, 4, and 5 are the crime of committing a crime. Crime 1 is commiting a crime for personal reasons. 4 is commiting a crime over the wire. 5 is commiting a crime using money.

The only real crime is Count 2: Theft of info.


For count 3, the prediction markets consider the "bets" to actually be futures contracts, and futures contracts are regulated together with commodities (in the U.S. by the CFTC). There is ongoing litigation about whether this is the proper designation, but that is the U.S. government's position. Insider trading rules are more lax for futures than other products, but I believe this case likely does violate existing rules.

I feel like if you followed the NBA scandal involving Chauncey Billups the wire fraud charge for insider prediction market trading was inevitable.

Damon Jones didn't work for the NBA and basically just told some people the status of an injury to LeBron because he hangs out with him (in exchange for money). His crime I guess is gambling illegally? But wire fraud (I think they even say "creating a fraudulent market") was thrown in there.

Seemed inevitable they were going to start charging prediction market insiders the same way.


> Count 4 - Wire Fraud

I almost always see this charge. Seems too strong as law


Wire fraud is simply the crime of committing a crime over wire. It just always doubles the counts and intensifies the punishment. Same goes for Count 5.

Wire fraud turns a state case into a federal case.

Yeah. And the penalties for wire fraud are steep. Up to 20 years in prison and $250k fine _per_ count.

Why would this be civilian versus the business of a JAG?

Because the JAG gets to prosecute stuff that violates the Uniform Code of Military Justice. That is their jurisdiction. They don't have the authority to prosecute state crimes, nor what naughty stuff you did at Disney.

>agent now proactively detects when your app needs a database or login. After you approve a Firebase integration, it provisions Cloud Firestore for databases and Firebase Authentication for a secure sign-in with Google... securely integrate services like databases, payment processors or Google services like Maps. The agent detects when a key is required and safely stores it in the new Secrets Manager located in the Settings tab.

Has some really neat integrations. Really strikes me as a huge contrast with Apple, which yesterday seemed to oppose vibe coding (by preventing updates to Replit and Vibecode).


Configuring an application environment is a huge obstacle. The number of people who can think logically and break down a business problem into pieces is 10x the number of people who can recite the exact right incantations to get a working cloud setup.


You in the 90s: "Leaded fuel isn't illegal guys, stop your campaigning, let's keep huffing it"

How about coming up with an actual defense of social media rather than an ad hominem about "neurotics"?


Consuming social media doesn't have an inescapable negative impact on other people, unlike burning leaded fuel. In the same way that eating junk food doesn't. Should we ban junk food? What else do you want to ban from others just because it has a risk profile you personally don't feel comfortable with?


> Consuming social media doesn't have an inescapable negative impact on other people

You don't think large portions an entire generation(s) getting cooked by social media doesn't have negative externalities that impact society as a whole?


I don't think anybody has the moral authority to regulate such second-order effects.

Should unhealthy food be banned because of the second-order effects of obesity? What about mandatory church / religious service? After all, I judge that atheism has negative second-order effects on the world. Where would I get this moral authority from?


For fuzzy second order effects you have fuzzy second order impacting laws.

You increase disclosure norms, you increase monitoring and you ensure marketing and packaging norms that disclose the potential risks.

You aren’t allowed to put up booze and cigarette stores near schools. These are not new problems that humanity has never encountered before.


> You aren’t allowed to put up booze and cigarette stores near schools.

Huh? Where? In many countries grocery and convenience stores sell both. When I was in school I could have gone across the street to get both. Everywhere I've travelled it's been even more accessible. The only place I've seen these restrictions are in very religious places, which are not analogous to morality in any way.

Lets play a little though experiment: Is it okay for me and my friend to send each other messages over the internet? Can we send images and videos? What about a group chat with all of our friends? What if our neighbourhood joins in? What if our city joins in? What if our country joins in?

Can you identify the precise step in which this becomes unallowable? Can you articulate a logical reason why it's unallowable, but the previous steps are fine?

Can you do this without it becoming a subjective question about your personal moral values?

This is the problem with laws and mandates. They can't just be based on your own subjective feelings. And as humans, we have very different thoughts and feelings on what is good and bad, what should be allowed an unallowed. Furthermore, many things are perfectly legal despite causing harm. If I reject someone's advances and they suffer negative mental consequences, have I violated their rights? They've suffered harm after all. To whom are their obligations for?

There can be claimed "fuzzy second order effects" to every single human action. Authoritarians believe they are smarter than everyone else and have the right to enforce their subjective and often incorrect opinions on everyone else. In another country, on another topic, this would be about something else - maybe religion. This does not form a solid legal basis for anything.


I wonder where folks like this came from, and at what point did people who associate themselves with hacker culture decide that censorship is great.

The OG hackers thought of censorship as network damage that needed to be routed around.

People who support censorship always think of themselves as smarter than the rest. Dunning-Krueger however would suggest something different.


I posted above that social media related issues are a problem, and then a bunch of posts accused me of wanting to make it illegal. I never suggested that and I actually don't support censorship, I just wish some people I know didn't spend so much of their time bummed out about social media.



"Defense Department intended to “refocus” the news organization... it “should” republish content created by the Defense Department public affairs offices with a label describing its origin"

Article makes it clear that they're banning the publication of wire services with the goal to make this publication more like a DoD PR team and less like a news source.


Wait, they can't even internally remember that they're the DoW (Department of War) and not DoD?


I suspect that was deliberate. DoW is the preferred nomenclature but DoD is still technically correct.

The article is phrased in a way to imply that the author would rather the publication maintain independence. It is probably the last time she will be permitted to say "department of defense".


They're not. That's executive fiat. The actual name of the department changes if Congress says it does.


The Department of War is an “alternate title”. Department of Defense continues to be correct


> The Department of War is an “alternate title”.

Like "alternative facts"?


You're probably right. I've been thinking about why anthropic's revenue keeps soaring. I think in terms of "new users trying the product" we're definitely somewhere in the slowing part of the S-curve (at least in the US), but there are other growth contributors. Two bigs ones are people finding new use-cases and people figuring out how to scale up current use-cases to use more tokens. Perhaps little temporary-usage-boosts like this give people permission to attempt new use-cases or more scale and realize they could use a higher tiered plan.


>Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open source project from scratch.

Fact that this is satire aside, why would a company like this limit this methodology to only open source? Since they can make a "dirty room" AI that uses computer-use models, plays with an app, observes how it looks from the outside (UI) and inside (with debug tools), creates a spec sheet of how the app functions, and then sends those specs to the "clean room" AI.


> observes how it looks from the outside (UI) and inside (with debug tools), creates a spec sheet of how the app functions, and then sends those specs to the "clean room" AI.

and tbh, i cannot see any issues if this is how it is done - you just have to prove that the clean room ai has never been exposed to the source code of the app you're trying to clone.


>This means the step function has more predictive power (“fits better”) than the linear slope. For fun, we can also fit a function that is completely constant across the entire timespan. That happens to get the best Brier score.

I mean, sure. but it's obvious in that graph that the single openai model is dragging down the right side. Wouldn't it be better to just stick to analyzing models from only one lab so that this was showing change over time rather than differences between models?


Will using a voice-to-text app to create my comment get me banned? Especially if it creates a transcription mistake that might be characteristic of an LLM


I wouldn't expect voice-to-text apps to produce anything that looks "Signature LLM" since it's still your words, your grammar, etc.. The occasional transcription mistake is unlikely to be an issue either, given the prevalence of humans here who use em-dashes, speak ESL, etc..


I've been using a voice-to-text app on android that replaces my keyboard. I love it because on mobile I can speak faster than I type, but it does produce perfectly written text with no grammar mistakes and better flow and structure. So it doesn't write my speech 1:1. It has made writing on my phone much more fun and increased my productivity and decreased my threshold for commenting on forums. But now I guess I won't be using it on HN in the future...

(Disclaimer: I did not use it for this comment)


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