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Hacking for Defense Stanford 2026 – Lessons Learned Presentations
- kittikitti 3mo agoThis is incredibly cringeworthy knowing the ethical and moral issues surrounding artificial intelligence. The problem "Team SwarmShield" is obviously directly related to a problem Israeli defense forces have to deal with. It's a sad state of Stanford if they're hosting this along with allegedly leading what defined guardrails for artificial intelligence.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- traverseda 3mo agoAlso problems Ukrainian defense needs to solve, and that the Canadian military is trying to solve. This is everyone's problem. It's also biased towards defense use.
- jMyles 3mo agoSure, I think anyone can appreciate that. But this program appears to just treat war like it's some perfectly normal thing, rather than the most undesirable aspect of humanity which we're hoping to finally bring to an end so can we enjoy an age of peace amidst the internet. This page literally presents war as if it's a profit vector rather than a societal ill - something that antiwar activists have been claiming is the actual impetus for most conflicts in the world, only to be called conspiracy theorists in response. It's just totally nauseating. So while, in the abstract, preventing people from being killed by drone swarms is a great idea, it's tainted from the get-go if the solution is just to make more money by having bigger killing machines, rather than preventing people from wanting/needing to drone swarm other people from the outset.
- graphime 3mo ago> But this program appears to just treat war like it's some perfectly normal thing, rather than the most undesirable aspect of humanity which we're hoping to finally bring to an end so can we enjoy an age of peace amidst the internet. War has existed for all of human history. Why do you think humans today are special and will eliminate war? The only acceptable answer is: you want hope.
- jMyles 3mo ago> Why do you think humans today are special and will eliminate war? Isn't this _the entire point_ of the internet? To evolve beyond states and boundaries and warfare as a way of making decisions about resource allocation? It strikes me as very short-sighted to decline to act as a generation on this matter. Humans today (or lets say, in these next few centuries) _are_ special; we have arrived at an evolutionary milestone with the birth of a new organism that does seem capable of lasting peace.
- pasc1878 3mo agoWhat a thing invented (or at least large parts) by DARPA. An agency of the United States Department of Defense. You expect that the whole point of something there not to boost the US military?
- jMyles 3mo agoTwo things: 1) Sure, good things do emerge from less good things. That's how improvement happens. That's why we have thumbs thumbs today, even though none of our ancestors in the neoproterozoic era did. 2) On longer time scales (say, measuring from about 5,000 years ago to 5,000 years hence), I'm not sure we can say that DARPAnet was the most important evolutionary milestone in the emergence of the internet. It has been long and steady with several exciting jumps, where DARPAnet is just one. I'm also wary of being steered too much by the physical models (from vacuum tubes to GPU data centers) and not enough by the founding notions and ideas and songs and treatises. To me, The Two Sisters -=> Salt Creek -=> Terrapin Station -=> A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace -=> archive.org is a more dispositive lineage than the circuity, especially with regard to the potential for peace that exists in this domain.
- mhb 3mo agoCouldn't resist dragging Israel in, right?
- inigyou 3mo agoIsrael is America's biggest ally and an active war zone. Of course it's relevant to most war things that are going on right now.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- jMyles 3mo agoWow, I thought this was satire for a second. This is a level of shamelessness that I'm really surprised Stanford (or anyone involved) can tolerate being associated with. > Department of War Directory – This year the students had access to a Department of War Directory – essentially a phonebook of ~5,700 names of “Who buys in the Dept of War?” The directory includes a tutorial on how the DoW buys and the various acquisition and funding processes and programs that exist for startups. It provides details on how to sell to the DoW and where the Program Acquistion Officers (PAEs) fit into that process. Literally teaching people how to make money selling misery and violence. No mention of how the tech involved can be used to constrain states, stop wars, establish justice, identify war crimes and restore victims, nothing. I thought we were beyond this in 2026.
- mhb 3mo agoYou don't think the US military should have the best technology?
- jMyles 3mo agoI don't mind it having the latest technology; I just don't want it to exist. How long do we think the US military will persist in the universe? 5,000 years? 1,000? 500? 100? Surely it's closer to the last among these answers than the first. What we need is peaceful, sober deprecation of this institution, and in particular, decommissioning of the nuclear arsenal. And there's no good reason that can't start today.
- mhb 3mo agoHow do you reconcile that aspiration with lunatics and their regimes that would like to do harm to other countries?
- graphime 3mo ago[flagged]
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- AndrewKemendo 3mo agoOriginal H4D comments from 2015 when steve blank started this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9442981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9442981
- gmerc 3mo agoPlease, it’s War now, now defense.
- Aeolun 3mo agoMost of the problems seem defense oriented
- inigyou 3mo agoThat's how they try to frame them to make you feel less ethically dissonant.
- borski 3mo agoSure, and I’ll totally switch to calling it “X” instead of Twitter and the Gulf of America instead of Mexico. Nope, hard pass. I’ll use the real names and people can understand me just fine. If they insist, I have little desire to continue the conversation.
- hagbard_c 3mo agoI do the same: sex instead of 'gender' illegal instead of 'undocumented' mother instead of 'gestating person' or 'birthing person' homeless instead of 'unhoused person' criminal instead of 'justice-involved person' paedophile instead of 'minor-attracted person' prostitute instead of 'sex worker' ...and whatever other neologisms happen to be pushed by activists, politicos and the media. If there is a good existing term which is replaced for no valid reason I use the existing term. If there is a good reason to replace it - which is rare - I use the new term. If they insist I do continue the conversation using the correct - existing - terms. The other side often shows little desire to continue the conversation which I find odd given that they generally wouldn't have had any problems using those terms a decade ago.
- awongh 3mo agoPeople surprised by this don’t know that the expertise that incubated silicon chips at Stanford and around the valley was based on electrical engineering work done for world war II / cold war radar technology, among other things. Stanford and SV have always had deep defense ties. Palmer Luckey and Palantir etc are just the latest iteration of this.
- rockskon 3mo agoThat's about as culturally relevant to Stanford as talking of people who lived through the great depression. The DoD doesn't get to neglect relationships with a community for decades and then talk of how much in common they have with each other. It's nonsense and transparently manipulative.
- nradov 3mo agoHuh? The DoD has maintained relationships with many area startups and tech companies for decades. Have you not been paying attention?
- rockskon 3mo agoI question what specifically you're referring to. Yes, Hack for Defense is a decade old now. But the DoD famously had not done much business with area startups for many decades outside of very specific success stories like the CIA's In-Q-Tel. Turns out that start-ups can't wait several years for a contract award. They tend to die in that time if they have no funding. Additionally - talk of electrical engineering work done for world war II / cold war radar technology has been a oft-repeated tagline by members of military leadership as well as Palantir representatives when talking amongst themselves about Silicon Valley or in their appeals to SV itself. "We have so much in common! Here, why don't you open your history book and I'll show you!" - that's what the appeal comes off like. I maintain that primarily relying on those examples is a poor choice in trying to establish cultural similarities.
- borski 3mo ago