skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An interesting documentary is "Hacking Democracy" (2006) [0] that championed open voting machines and open election processes to help prevent election fraud. The documented fraud that occurred in the early 2000's really lifted some of my childhood innocence from my teenage brain.

When mistakes that happen are chalked up to "computer glitches", but it only takes such a few bugs in a few key locations to change the outcome of an election, the results can be game-changing.

The full documentary was pretty concerning, and I have carried very little faith in the voting process since.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qk95SVRdEo (Last minute contains the section where the grandmother "steals" proprietary Diebold Election Systems code off an open webpage)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy
'Disrupting' Tech's Diversity Problem with a Code Camp for Girls of Color
That's quite worrying. I wonder why they haven't made a bigger hit in the glassdoor rating.
Now that's an interesting thought.

Especially coupled with another reply, about my insurance company buying me one. They buy me one tomorrow, and raise my premiums the next year because I drink more than their actuarial table allows.
RiftSketch: live coding in virtual reality
And for how long was Siri just a set of regular expression rules?
That's a pretty harsh statement.

It's hard for average American IT workers to compete with H1B when many of latter carpool, share houses, and are willing to work for less.

Sure they pay income taxes, but over $22 billion gets remitted to india from U.S. That's remittance of after tax wage alone. Total IT expenditure is likely in the hundreds of billions if you include Indian subcontracting firms, u.s. investment in India, etc.

Look, I don't like Donald Trump. I also recognize there are many talented H1B out there that play vital role. But current implementation of H1B is completely broken.

A lot of H1B positions in the U.S. has nothing to do with U.s companies' global competitiveness, because many of them are employed in service sectors like insurance companies.
I hope in your day-to-day interactions with others, at the very least you strive for cooperation based on common understanding, social bonding, and mutual aid.

Even at my place of work, which has an implied hierarchy with force backing it up, I strive for this. When people need to pull rank or exert force, something is wrong. People who work together well work together without force.

Force is how you get people to do what you want when they don't want to do it. The only way you can think force is inevitable is if you think you can't live harmoniously with other people. To look beyond force as a means of social organization, one must be an optimist, but when you do that, you find all around you possibilities. The relationships that nourish and support us most fully are the least violent ones.
That's what they said about the rule of gods and kings.
Create a Self Signed SSL Certificate on Nginx for Ubuntu 14.04
Is there any book that teaches algorithms in say a language like python ( which i find comfortable to use ). Most books focus on C,C++ and/or java. I am not good at C++ or java. Since most books give examples out in C++, i tend to find them a little intimidating.
Also, the conditions for success don't necessarily lead to "better" humans. The most successful humans don't seem to be moving us forward particularly well.
Brilliant. Every language should have a book like this. I'm already learning a lot of little details about features I've had some passing experience on. Only request I have (which I generally have for stuff like this), is for real life use cases. Example would be args and *kwargs being used in decorators. Where do you use it? What's a real life example of it being used? How does that compare to the in built decorator functionality of Python? Answering this type of question helps people understand the technique and theory in equal measures as opposed to more theory than technique.

Thanks again for this :).
>> Was there image processing to distill the dress into major components, hand tagging of variables (like short/long, color, etc), or just raw pixel data processed?

Its pretty clear that this is PCA on raw pixels of the images, so no, there is no hand-tagging or anything else. The eigendresses are just the eigenvectors from PCA projected back into the original, image-scale, basis.
> Your entire post is a pretty damning conviction of yourself. I feel sorry for you.

I'm pretty sure you don't know me, and I get that you're comfortable offering your certain opinion of me based on not actually knowing me, tho I don't want that to dismiss what you said because this leads to a very important point.

Speak about anything you care about -- not just the things you feel you are immune to judgement on yourself.

This is so important.

in other words, if i'm only going to express an opinion on subjects i'm safe from judgement on, that doesn't make me a very reliable source ( huge personal bias ) and i'm choosing to try to protect my ego ( and also not challenge myself in what could be opportunities for improvement ) instead of saying something inspiring with regards to ways improvements could be made in general.

if i did that id be choosing ego and me over contributing to technology and progress and success. that doesn't work.

it's pretty simple. i believe in technology, humanity and progress and success, and i see clearly a lot of the ways that people limit themselves and their thinking and sometimes i choose to say something about it. a reason contributing to that choice is because i care about these things, and it works for people to work on them, and if you are not working on them, not because you're not capable but because your perspective doesn't work, then theres a big opportunity for improvement, that sometimes i choose to contribute to meeting with what i say.

i know i pick the subjects that get the most pushback, and a reason contributing to this for me is because this is the ones that are holding people back the most, the ones that are most important and where people are most stuck by the clarity missing from the ways they are getting in their own way. it's like the importance of working on the big opportunities, if you only pick the areas where there are small safe bets, you think small and the results
you get will be small.

so in contributing to the meta opportunity of the psychology with which people approach this work, just like with the opportunities in tech themselves, if you choose to contribute to the area with the riskiest biggest bets the results you get will be the greatest.

what i am doing by pushing back here in the middle of controversy is the very essence of what we do as founders.
Thanks for the reference. We did talk to one of the first employees of ultraglobal once and learnt its limitations and the challenges it faced. Autonomous vehicle technology is definitely complex but deployable for low speed vehicles in controlled environments. The recent developments in the autonomous Robotics space and a significant reduction in sensor prices make this the best time for such a product.
Yep, security is a big one. Authentication & encryption can behave very unpredictably if your times are not in sync. So, you might not be able to login to a server, or connect via HTTPS etc
Bioelectricity: Discovery shows bacteria can be used for power (2005)
Lessons learned: 30+ data science interviews from a 3 month immersive graduate [pdf]
Fathom – First consumer-level underwater drone
True, but who cares? We're not talking about future dates, we're talking about recording a current timestamp, at which time we of course know the time zone and whether or not DST is in effect at that current point.
Thanks for the suggestion! Can you please suggest any book that deals with algorithms in python or other "non-heavy" languages ? I mean to ask, that i haven't invested much time in learning java. All i have learnt about computers is on the job and i am more comfortable working with scripting languages and / or C. Hence the request.
The certification was done by the Election Assistance Commission, created in the wake of the Florida 2000 punchcard ballot debacle. The EAC hastily certified the first batch of electronic voting machines, issued grants to the states to buy them before the ink on the certifications was dry, and then was promptly forgotten about. (There was a 3-year period when the EAC was unable to do business because all the seats on its board were vacant.)
The logic is to prevent sensational titles. By forcing the title to be the page's heading, it limits posters ability to target the hn audience with a snappy, BuzzFeed-like, heading.
Since the outcome of the process facilitated by these machines determines the authority to levy and spend taxes, doesn't it make sense - for this one particular expenditure - to have a wall of independence, both political and financial?
Also https://www.treode.com/
Meh... it'll probably just be replace by rule by corruption and deception.

Force is probably cleaner given the choice.
How far would he get if he argued the same about women or minorities?
Work Policies May Be Kinder, but Brutal Competition Isn’t
http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/11/nebia

Blatant.
Ubuntu also inherits quite a bit of 's390x' platform compatibility work from Debian. For a user coming from a non-mainframe Linux background who wants the normal packages to "just work", it might be further along than other Linux distros (but: I have not quantified this). Debian-on-Z doesn't have as much testing as x86, of course, but since it's one of the five officially supported Debian architectures (x86, ARM, PPC, MIPS, S390x), it gets constant autobuilds of the whole archive, a reasonable amount of debugging effort, and release-engineering attention.
> the Leksah maintainer acknowledged that on some platform (I forget which), Leksah crashes in every session

Only on exit, so it has not been a high priority to fix.

https://github.com/leksah/leksah/issues/130

> and has a CPU-spinning bug.

This was in version 0.15.1.0, 0.15.1.1 and 0.15.1.2. It was fixed in 0.15.1.3 (released a month after 0.15.1.0).

https://github.com/leksah/leksah/issues/149

Please try Leksah! It is not perfect, but any feedback you could give would help us make it better.
Please do better than these folks who just won a bid for elections in Los Angeles, and previously held elections in South Dakota, New Jersey, Chicago, IL, Cook County, IL, Denver, CO, Oregon, New South Wales, El Paso, CO, Utah, West Virginia, Honolulu, HI, Franklin County, WA, Swindon Borough, UK: http://www.everyonecounts.com

so the real question is where is the startup with the
solution of $35 tablet "voting machines" on $10 stands and
a $30 SBC "voting server" in a $15 lockbox that can deliver
4 "deluxe voting terminals" with a "server" for $2,000?

They appear to be using an iPad with their "SaaS voting app": http://www.everyonecounts.com/voting-unit/
He went through with it. There's video and a post-flogging podcast interview from Anon UK Radio: http://thecryptosphere.com/2015/08/17/raymond-johansen-of-pp...
I haven't done a deep dive into how DDG works, but "In Partnership with Yandex" is on the search results. Yandex is a Russian search engine, and while you may find the NSA snooping intrusive and obnoxious, Russia isn't exactly a privacy-respecting libertarian utopia. No one ever seems to mention the Russian connection in discussions about DDG, though. If this is something you've considered and reckoned through to it not being a concern, I would be quite interested in your reasoning.
A commission apparently tasked with ensuring that the hijincks observed in Florida and Ohio are permitted to continue and proliferate.
Yeah, no problem with your sweet outlook, though I don't appreciate the personalization of your response.

But what would I do if some unenlightened person sought to compel me through the threat of force?
> A non-technical person (yeah yeah, I don't believe for a second she was ever an engineer, that's vanity talking) is eliminating %90 of the applicants and they think that's a "high bar"? No. That's randomness.

I wish more people could wrap their heads around this. Her process could be rolling a D10 for every CV she receives, then lighting the CV on fire unless it passes the saving throw, and she'd still be able to say "we ended up interviewing roughly 1 in 10 people that applied". It says absolutely nothing about the effectiveness of her methods.

I've been involved in hiring in the past, and discussed this issue with people having this mindset, even using this exact example with the D10, but I don't think I've ever gotten through. Some people will insist on believing that any highly selective screening process is automatically good, without any further introspection.
Hey thanks for your suggestions! I have started learning algorithms multiple times and dropped it mid way since either i find it intimidating or i am stuck and i can't find help. I am giving this another shot. Hopefully i make it.
For what its worth take a look at https://medium.com/@periscope/periscope-by-the-numbers-6b23d... and guess when they released their android version. Notice anything?
> I hear the recent versions on MtGO are better

Oh god no.

Yeah, version 1 was bad, (Leaping Lizards was clearly in over their heads) so Wizards stepped in and made everything utterly worse.

First they made a half-assed attempt at a "version 2", which they bungled so badly they had to actually shut the game down while they recovered the pieces. But this, rather than convincing them that they hadn't a clue how to write or operate MTGO, instead convinced them that they needed to double down. For version 3, they decided rewrite the entire thing from scratch. Sort of an unholy amalgamation of second-system effect, NIH syndrome, and the coding skills you'd expect from a company that had never made a computer game before.

Version 3 was hugely delayed, hugely overbudget, and...well...utter, utter crap. The UI was worse, many features were lost, performance was bad, stability was terrible; there was literally no advantage over version 2. It took them 5 years to launch it, more to make it playable, and when it was done, it was so bad I stopped player literally because I couldn't stand the client any more.

Apparently there's a version 4 now, but it's basically just 3.1; they didn't fix any of the core issues. If they could bring back something that looked and worked like version 2, I might start playing again, but really, every version they released was some form of pathetically bad. There's literally a half dozen half-assed shareware deck builders from 15 years ago that had better UIs than any MTGO client has ever had. :(

Even before Hearthstone, I used to wonder what might have been if Wizards had signed a deal with a "real" developer like Blizzard to build and run the game properly. With the launch of Hearthstone, I think we know. Oh well.
You may be killed. H2S is very toxic.
I use decorators like that in Django where I want to reuse the same code to check something on the request object but the functions I am decorating expect keyword arguments
Thanks for the advice! Trust me, i haven't heard of some of the things you have mentioned above. So it definitely helps!
> I don't know whether the original Loglan project to do this relied only on human creativity or also on software (and whether Lojban used a human editorial step after the software step).

I no longer recall whether Loglan used software for its derivations, but it hardly matters -- both Loglan and Lojban had very similar goals and methods here (although naturally Lojban always tried to improve on the forerunner, Loglan).

I encouraged Lojban to normalize to something that could be handled by yacc(1). That turned out to be complicated, although I recall that that goal was at least nominally met.
Recent versions still do not seem to work well (It is based on .NET :-s). I tried it about a month ago, and it crashes instantly on starting to play a game. Many people suggest to play it from a virtual machine. I just gave up for now... and went back to paper Magic, Duels and CardForge.
Nonlinear methods can result in a smaller (lower-dimensional) representation, but they are non-linear so they are harder to use and usually require more data. On the other hand, PCA is easy and having 50 or more principal components is often not a problem, unless you are doing visualization. With the additional representational capacity from just keeping extra dimensions you can still get good reconstructions.
It entirely depends if it's using cryptography or not [1]. For example, using zero knowledge proofs you can be given a receipt that lets you verify your vote was included in the total (without allowing you to prove to an attacker which party you voted for).

Using the computers as glorified counters is a security nightmare. Using them for what they're good at (crypto) would be a security boon, with the main downside being how hard it would be for non-computer-scientists to understand the nature of the security.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDnShu5V99s
I'd agree that a hunter/gatherer lifestyle may provide a local maximum in some regions, at some points in time.

For instance, in Japan, the Jomon hunter/gatherers persisted long after they might have been supplanted by settled agriculturists just across the water. According to Jared Diamond in his later edition of Guns, Germs and Steel, the sheer fertility of Japan's land and seas allowed the Jomon people to maintain a relatively sophisticated culture, mitigating advances which might otherwise have arrived from the fertile crescent via Korea.
It's very much worth reading the comments on this one, in which a Virginia elections official who was involved with these machines repeatedly defends them in a delightfully earnest but disturbingly clueless manner.

One of the points he's stuck on is that WiFi is short-range and unreliable from outside a building. Thus hacking these things from the parking lot would be impractical because you couldn't get access. Apparently the very concept of directional antennas is completely unfamiliar to this person.

Another strange point is that these defects weren't known when Virginia chose these machines. To him, that seems to mean "therefore it was a reasonable decision." To me, it raises the question: why didn't anyone look into their security as the choice was being made? Apparently the process by which Virginia chooses its voting machines, or at least the process it used at the time, involves no third-party security evaluation. What the hell?
What you should do is pick one stack to work with, and become good at it.

It's okay to not like the stack you picked, as long as it's popular. But learning is hard, so stick with whatever you picked to the point where you have a mobile app, or a web app on a server with a rest API that your front end code uses.

Some stacks you might look at:
Have a new Macbook and an Iphone? learning swift and objective C and picking up IOS programming will get you work.
Have an Android phone, and any sort of computer that's moderately fast? Learn Java and becoming an Android Developer.

But maybe you want to do a web stack. You generally want some experience on the back and and the front end. When in your learning, you don't know what to use out of a bunch of tools, pick what is most widely used, and if it's a tie, go with the older thing, or the simpler thing.

You will be learning Javascript, as well as HTML and CSS for the front end dev work, so for the back end Node.js, which is a server side javascript platform, is a good thing to learn. Express is one framework, but it's most popular, and you want to pick up a popular stack.

Like Python? Learn Django. If the company you want to work for uses a microframework like Flask or something, they will still probably hire Django devs, but the opposite may not be true.

Like Ruby? Ruby on Rails isn't the only framework, but it's super popular, and you want to get the skills, right?

Learn to use the command line (Mac, Linux, or cygwin if you have to stay on windows) to do things. Sign up for Amazon's free 1 year of cloud services, so you can practice setting up stuff over ssh and using git.

Learn git, enough to be able to put projects up on github, and to get them down onto your server.

In terms of front end, learn enough jquery to interact with a REST API and get data from it into your app. Consider a front end framework like angular. Learn bootstrap, which is a CSS framework, because again, its popular.

It's not necessary to understand big O or data structures in detail for a startup job, but it might be to get hired. Knowing SQL is probably helpful eventually, but don't worry if you don't.

Why do I keep telling you to pick the popular thing? Because startups want people who may not know the stack, but know how to use a stack and accomplish something. You can get hired to do android dev knowing only IOS, or ruby on rails knowing django, or using react and backbone when you know angular.

Learning to program is hard. Try to get in an hour or two every day. Once you know how to make something specific in a specific stack, branch out and learn more broadly.

Good Luck.
Any hypothetical that doesn't leverage something we actually do here on earth (e.g. create large, self sustaining, floating cities) is science fiction. Not that we can't do it, but we're not going to go to Venus to build such things until we build a couple here to make sure it works.
You resist them with force.

Of course that's a little facetious. There's more to resisting force than simply meeting it with force in opposition. People live lives of resistance in all walks of life, and finding ways to get around hard, inflexible enforced conditions is useful to even powerful people. In general, the answer to your question is exactly determined b y the nature and context of the force.

Personally, I am a nonconfrontational person. I think avoiding confrontation has helped me find ways to deal with people who throw their authority around. On the subject of physical violence, well I don't want to spill personal details like that on a public forum.
This is actually a really good example of the CAP theorem. Because of the way Docs merges updates to a single document they had to either tie an editable document to a single machine or risk inconsistent updates. The choice was made to ensure consistency. If a doc gets too popular to be served off a single machine then it goes into read-only mode and gets distributed to multiple boxes. When the traffic dies down it can fall back to a single box and re-enter read/write mode.
That would have to be true, wouldn't it? How could your employer hold you to a contract you didn't sign?
I don't know anything about Boston Dynamics Robots, but "Deep Learning" is not a full solution to building robots. Deep Learning architectures may be used for sub-problems that robots need to solve, e.g. image classification, object recognition, or other classifications tasks where hand-designing features is hard and enough data is available.

Robots are a complex system with lots of moving pieces. Often they use some form of reinforcement learning (which in turn may use Deep Learning for estimating rewards) to decide which actions to take.
I opened an issue about this on Github and posted a workaround.

Now if only someone could accept my pull request :)
The keyboard has depth from mechanical linkages, sensors, and a frame to mount everything on. It's also recessed so it doesn't touch the screen when closed. See a teardown for the exact details. Since the keyboard can't be made any thinner, the only way to add more ports would be to make the laptop wider or thicker. Neither is going to happen.
That is also all that I am getting.