skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's difficult for a number of reasons, which I spell out in the essay you've failed to read:

Market mechanisms work best where goods are uniform (either individually
or on aggregate average), their qualities are readily determined (or
again tend to average out well), where the fixed costs of production are
low and marginal costs of production high (relative to one another), and
externalities, both positive and negative, are small relative to market
price.

Information goods violate virtually all these assumptions.

● Quality is highly variable.

● Quality assessment is difficult, and often frustrated by other factors (e.g., pay-to-publish journals, "friendly" colleague peer reviews, discussed recently by Joerg Fliege at The Other Place￼).

● Quality isn't, and often cannot, be known in advance.

● Variance of individual instances is high enough that averages rarely suffice.

● Fixed costs of production are high, particularly for research, also to an extent for selection, review, and editing.

● Variable costs of production (e.g., publication) are low. In fact we're utilizing a system which was specifically created to reduce those costs still further, Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web, developed to transmit physics papers between CERN, SLAC, and other related facilities.

● Information goods typically have very high positive externalities -- they benefit those who don't directly consume them. Occasionally they have high negative externalities -- e.g., smallpox, "superflu", or weapons research.

There's the question of what does a content payment scheme provide? Of which the answer is, generally, "an incentive to create content". What matters isn't whether or not each individual information trasnfer is equitably priced, but whether, at some reasonable interval (e.g., at years' end) you've got sufficient compensation for authors, researchers, reporters, etc., to provide an adequate supply of information and entertainment.

When distribution was on physical media, printing and transactional sales were reasonably appropriate. With the price of reproduction* approaching zero, but nonzero fixed costs of production, there's an inherent conflict in the mechanisms which allow for price discovery in markets.
Wow, that should not be understated!
Did you choose to lease, loan or buy? Would be interested in knowing the factors driving your decision.
The engineering job market is terrible in San Diego. It will probably get much worse once the Qualcomm layoffs hit.
I suspect that it could be bad for a few years more.

Most companies will not consider anyone unless they have a Master's Degree, or have some very specialized niche skill.

I've been unemployed EE since November 2014, am 54, and look for work every week. I send out resumes but get no response. I've rewritten my resume a few times, and had a pro look it over.

I really don't want to retire this early, but could do so if push came to shove.
This would certainly give new meaning to the phrase "Letting out the magic smoke".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_smoke
Awesome Post :) Very well written !!
Magic the Gathering Online was basically the entirety of online gaming in my teenage years (the rest was World of Warcraft and Guild Wars, ahem). The server problems and managers mentioned in the article triggered a lot of nostalgia, as it taught me back than that online servers are not made of magic and ponies, and QA is actually something companies should care about. I did actually get invited to a few beta tests for new MTGO sets, though. :)

I gave up in college after I learned that Magic the Gathering is actually kinda expensive.
What you are missing is that the technical part is not the hard part. The hard part is all the rest of it.

For example, here [0] is a link to the 200-page "volume 1" of the federal standards, merely one of a complex web of certifications that these things go through.

One random paragraph is illustrative:

Vote scanning and counting equipment for paper-based systems, and all DRE equipment, shall be able to withstand, without disruption of normal operation or loss of data, electrical fast transients of:
a. +2 kV and −2 kV on External Power lines (both AC and DC)
b. +1 kV and −1 kV on Input/Output lines(signal, data, and control lines) longer
than 3 meters
c. Repetition Rate for all transient pulses will be 100 kHz

Now I am a software engineer, and quite frankly I have no idea whether these are large tolerances which would require specialized equipment to withstand or whether e.g. my laptop would sail through this kind of event. Nor do I have any idea how I would demonstrate compliance with these requirements to the satisfaction of a federal examiner.

And that is what voting machines are. They are checkboxes on a specification. That means that you can buy them with confidence that somebody else's ass will be on the line when they turn out to be awful. The fact that they actually record votes is ancillary at best, the primary feature and the reason for buying them is that they tick the checkboxes.

As to why they seem overpriced, the reason is that it costs a lot of money to have an engineer hook the thing up to his fancy oscillator and write you a report that yes, this machine complies with requirement 4.1.2.6.c, over and over again.

[0] http://www.eac.gov/assets/1/Documents/VVSG.1.1.VOL.1.FINAL.p...
Using content scripts to manipulate your Facebook newsfeed
Also, make sure your wife never hears you call her a 'stakeholder'.
you can get a view of what's going on by looking through the images at https://www.flickr.com/photos/textfiles/sets/721576572772417... there's also microfiche.
Woah, nice stuff! This looks like a lot of fun- I just requested to become a 'hero'

I notice you've set up new accounts for everything. I assume this is to not associate your real billing details with the game. But you also don't post your name or where you're from.. may I ask why?
Congratulations you've rediscovered taxes and their purpose.
In the UK the count is done under the supervision of:

* The candidates themselves

* Journalists

* TV cameras

* Party representatives

* Electoral officials

* Anybody else who has a good reason to be there

The volunteers doing the counting are not going to risk a long stretch in prison with such a high chance of being caught.
Well also to comply with https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.
Why not print out N copies of the receipt, where N = number of parties (usually 2 in the US, Republicans and Democrats). Then, each receipt is placed in a box dedicated to each party. Then, representatives from each party get a box, and count receipts. All count should match (or be within a certain margin), right?
Time to move beyond private property, hierarchies, and rule by force.
Electronic voting machines used in Indian elections are custom built for the purpose, and cost about $100.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_voting_machines

All it has is N buttons, accumulators to store presses of each button in non-volatile memory, and a seven-segment LED display to indicate status (ready-to-vote, vote cast, etc.). Vote counting is done offline by connecting to a controller. No wifi or any other remote-access capability.

All that really needs to be done to create a paper trail is to add a printer.

Not implying that they're completely secure, but any breach at least needs physical access to the box. And physical security of the machines is on the same level as those provided for traditional ballot boxes.

Edit 1: The balloting unit does not even have a 7-segment display - just individual LEDs next to their buttons to provide feedback that the button has been pressed.

Edit 2: More details on the internals of the EVM: https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/evm-ccs10.pdf
Utter garbage.
I don't think we've invented a way to prevent catastrophic asteroid impacts yet.
The monthly "Who is Hiring" threads are a great resource. A lot of companies have listings for interns. Here's this month's thread for reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9996333
Movie Studios Pull Injunction Demand in MovieTube Lawsuit
Nary a mention of the much higher levels of violence in hunter-gatherer societies, past and present.
in my eyes

The law is not what's in your eyes, it's what's established by elected legislatures. And the proposed Washington law says that there is legal ivory if it's over 100 years old, and/or a very small part by volume of a musical instrument.
I don't know any in that area, I live in Dallas,TX. I would look at crunchbase under "serivces", eg:

https://www.crunchbase.com/category/services/d237b69050a3132...

Look on Linkedin for profiles similar to https://www.linkedin.com/company/dialexa (Company in Dallas is ~ 50 employees as software consultants).

Also, check sites like angel.co and email some founders there.

I would peruse cybercoders.com and dice.com and ping some recruiters there as a start mentioning that you're looking for part time work.
This is not the first Eco-shower nozzle, but probably the most expensive.

The reason people don't switch to the old kinds of evolution-nozzles is that they don't like them.

Everybody knows that. So why don't they talk about the shower experience?
Looks cool, not terrifying.
PayPal EBay Payment Email Scam – MailShark
Rethinking Systems Programming
I used MtGO version 1 as a filthy causal player and had fun, but the whole experience was very frustrating. For a game that involved occasionally moving a few rectangles around the screen, MtGO had huge (and ever increasing) system requirements for the time and never really ran well even on my fairly well-spec'ed machine. As I recall it also had some weird limitations on screen modes which led to stupidly crowded playing surfaces.

I hear the recent versions on MtGO are better, but it still isn't cross-platform or system friendly. It's a shame, because the basic game shone through the cruddy front-end and the servers actually enforced the rules well.
The documentation is awesome, I noticed it is pretty similar to React-CSS's documentation. Is that the original source of this documentation style or is there some library I can use for my own personal project?
Most voters aren't relevant anymore.

Princeton confirmed it in a study earlier this year. It's neatly summed up here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig
Welcome to Silicon Valley. Read most interviews with startup founders and the "visionaries", and you'll find plenty of that kind of rhetoric. "industry X is completely outdated", "product Y is absolutely worthless", etc. when industry X and product Y typically have the merits of 1) existing for more than 12 months before being acquired by $MEGACORP and 2) being of use to more people than the few lucky San Francisco residents with high Twitter follower counts that were accepted in the startup's private beta.

I was talking with a San Francisco teacher last week who was telling me about all the different partnerships her school has done with startups, and how they all had 2 things in common: they only added more work for the teachers without providing much benefits, and they thought they knew better than anyone.

Nothing to see here. To quote Torvalds, "talk is cheap, show me the code".
In fairness, at this point I don't think "abcde" is any less secure of a WEP password then something like "dahslkgjhalgihao". WEP is really broken at this point.
Those non-working "parasites" include most of the people how made the important scientific discoveries of the previous couple of centuries. You can't do that if you've all got the same job and live in a society that can't sustain progress of any kind.
Where are you getting this data from?
Select ECC Levels While Encoding DataMatrix Code and Detect Unreadable Barcode
What's pythonic(2005)
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10076731
It all reduces down to this: tech X can enable Y evil things so should we allow X to exist? Interstates were a good example as traffickers depend heavily on them. Cameras are vital to spread of child porn online. Printing presses and printers if not that. Pencils if it gets down to sketching. They're even doing animated stuff according to some sources: there goes any non-locked-down video game system. Traffickers also use cars, 18 wheelers, trains, and boats.

The tool/tech X can aid evil Y is weak because the good from X far outweighs Y. There's always an evil minority. Obsessive people motivated by control or money will find a way to act on those motivations. They'll use whatever tools are at their disposal. We shouldn't stop having freedom, privacy, Internet anonymity, etc w/ all the benefits because an abuse might happen. That you possessed or sold a technology someone might have abused is on them, not you. And they're pretty good at getting away with it even without anonymity tools or crypto.

But, believe me, most Americans are happy to abuse the hell out of children with tech so long as it's the foreign children building America's tech for 10-12 hr straight at horrid wages and conditions to make that tech cheaper. ;) What you worry about is at record lows and what I just mentioned is at record highs. American double standard, just them worrying about the wrong things, or both?
Well, couldn't _only_ the voting machine record the time the token was used as long as the token is random? (They could just generate N tokens -- one for each registered voter -- and pull one from the pool each time.)

If they recorded the time you took your token and the time the token was used then they'd have a small enough pool of people to work with. I know in my state if a precinct has a small enough pool of registered voters it doesn't show the vote totals from the precinct because of privacy issues.
We've definitely designed them and done most of the difficult research. [1][2]

Even though it's not fully realized, it's an entirely likely and plausible outcome of agriculture.

[1] http://www.universetoday.com/90798/every-way-devised-to-defl...

[2] http://www.space.com/21333-asteroid-nuke-spacecraft-mission....
> I can't imagine many people buying a million dollar mainframe just to run Linux.

The Techcrunch version of this story [1] has an interesting bit on the pricing model, suggesting that the up-front cost will be much lower than usual (but no specific numbers).

By offering an elastic, cloud-like pricing model, [IBM] is hoping to land more customers who might have been scared away previously by the up-front cost of investing in a mainframe. The metered mainframe will still sit inside the customer’s on-premises data center, but billing will be based on how much the customer uses the system, much like a cloud model, Mauri explained.

Of course it depends a lot on the specifics, since IBM does already bill in part based on usage. So this could be either a significant departure in pricing approach, or just marketing a tweak on it.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/16/ibm-teams-with-canonical-on...
> I hear the recent versions on MtGO are better

From what I've read, the recent versions of MTGO are worse. Yes, worse than the client made in 2002, with fewer features and a worse UI.

https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/2gz8k2/an_average...
I enjoy watching college football, but the more I think about it, the more it seems like enjoying the taste of veal. College degrees from many schools are already of uncertain worth when considered in the context of student loan debt. If one-to-five years of college (not necessarily a degree) is not clearly worth going into crippling debt, how can it be clearly worth brain damage and lifelong lameness? That's before one considers the many NCAA rules instituted specifically to screw over student athletes, or the racial and class implications of football and basketball paying for lacrosse and swimming.

If professors from a century ago could see us today, they wouldn't even care about all that. What would horrify them would be the primary focus on athletics found at most colleges and universities (and the large focus found at nearly every school). Admissions, funding, grading, leadership, etc.: every aspect of academics is in some way distorted by athletics.

I'm not saying that college athletics couldn't possibly be run in benign fashion. Not-inherently-dangerous sports could be played, for recreation and education, in a noncommercial environment, without problems. A careful examination, however, reveals that as currently instituted, college athletics is bad for colleges, bad for athletics, bad for college students, and even worse for college athletes.
Great post! I found Fenwick trees particularly useful when I was implementing layout / view recycling. The problem is that you need to keep track of a large number of vertically stacked elements with dynamic & varying heights, and you need a way to efficiently get the prefix sum. Would be curious if anyone else has real life use cases of these.
Jenkin-Open Source Continuous Integration Server
No, that's actually the main benefit of NN. They improve with more data for longer than almost any alternative algorithm.
BTW, to reason a bit about this statement in a simpler fashion: "any natural number “K” can be obtained from sum of other natural numbers (less than K), where these natural numbers are powers of 2"

Think what you're doing mentally when converting a binary number to decimal. For example:
101001

Each one of those 1s represents 2^position, all added together, so:

41 = 32 (100000 = 2^5)
+ 8 ( 1000 = 2^3)
+ 1 ( 1 = 2^0)

Since any natural number can be represented in decimal and binary, the rule applies that each binary 1 is the value of 2^that position, all summed up.
Clapping upbeat is hard but it's the mental equivalent of limb independance, so good.
And this is a perfect example of a time when using the original title is stupid. There's absolutely no good reason to insist on original titles for their own sake, when the original title is meaningless, lacks context, or is otherwise inadequate - none of which are necessarily the same thing as "misleading or linkbait".
> “Apple spent billions of dollars on Siri and worked on it for a very long time with hundreds of engineers and a huge dataset of voices – and it’s f–ing idiotic. Siri is nearly useless,”

He betrays how ignorant he is about Siri, or manipulative if its all a ruse for the press. Slack is a simple text chat application! The hubris!
The machine may not print a log in order.

i.e. the attack scenario is a small town, where you record each person as they come in. Then later you can look at the vote in order and know who voted what.

> Presumably the forces doing the coercion wouldn't have access to the audit tape.

That is not a valid assumption. Your machine must be resistant even to that attack.

> If they did, then we're already screwed no matter what system we implement.

No. The audit must not be able to be correlated with the person, the order, or the time.
Web Mercator Map Projection
The source code is now up on github. https://github.com/mcrowe/neurovis
How would you possibly move beyond rule by force?
"modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors..."

Given that "Turks" proper are a Central Asian people and not the original inhabitants of Turkey I have to wonder exactly what ancestors he is referring to.

Another point... maybe the skeletons before agriculture were taller, could be, but I'm guessing there are many more skeletons available from the agricultural period, so if the goal is maximum net skeletons, the agricultural period takes the prize (can't support a lot of people hunting gathering). There are probably plenty of tall skeletons from this period as well. Rulers who had the malnourished masses doing their work for them. But a malnourished skeleton still has more mass than a skeleton that just plain isn't there because the lifestyle never would have brought it into existence.

I've never been a fan of Jared Diamond. I think his analysis is too one dimensional and neglects myriads of factors in his quest for "the reason". I realize he is very popular and he does raise some somewhat interesting points at times. He just gives them too much credit for causing everything. Frankly, this piece sounds like it was written by a guy who wants to have a life a little bit freer than it is right now.
It's not bad unless you want to upload detached signatures. Then it's a frantic search to find the right incantation to make it work.
I suspect that detonating a few nuclear warheads at the right point relative to an asteroid would evaporate enough matter from its surface to change its course without breaking it into small uncontrollable pieces.

This is, I suppose, well within means of current space technology, provided that we have enough time, e.g. several years or at least many months, to get the rockets to the asteroid.
My personal take is to minimize the amount of temperature variance over time so I'd invest time and money in insulation, weather stripping, other upgrades first as well as reducing my electrical usage in general.

Right now, I'm at a point where I need to use a FLIR to investigate more improvements after which will I then think about solar but it's nice to read up on solar improvements.
What has paid for the devices under consideration in TFA? Why have those taxes not resulted in the usable machine described by GP?
I'm pretty sure that most of the 7.3 billion of us wouldn't be alive without agriculture. So if agriculture was a mistake, does that mean most of us shouldn't be alive?
Some people believe that but wouldn't try to argue it with you.
Assuming that "Windows Server Containers" are based on the Drawbridge technology that's been around Microsoft for a few years, the containers can only mess with other containers to the extent that you've configured them to be able to.

I used Drawbridge to implement R support in the Azure Machine Learning service two years ago (as referenced at https://redmondmag.com/blogs/the-schwartz-report/2014/10/win... ), but I haven't worked on it since so I don't know how things have evolved.
How to hack against Slavery
Hmm I wasn't aware that anywhere in Aus was doing online voting! My only experiences have been either Federal elections or Victoria State Elections, which both follow pretty much the same process.
I don't think you can. Rule by force permeates the entirety of nature.
I need to get one Dash button and set it up so that pressing it orders more Dash buttons.
Vote scanning and counting equipment for paper-based systems, and all DRE equipment, shall be able to withstand, without disruption of normal operation or loss of data, electrical fast transients of: a. +2 kV and −2 kV on External Power lines (both AC and DC) b. +1 kV and −1 kV on Input/Output lines(signal, data, and control lines) longer than 3 meters c. Repetition Rate for all transient pulses will be 100 kHz

That kind of testing is par for the course for electronics manufacturing at scale, though it does seem these requirements are quite stringent. The 100kHz repetition rate sounds odd though, and some of the other specs aren't completely clear. But regulatory testing of electronics is, in general, a solved problem, as are the mitigations for voltage surges.
I could find at least a case for educating end users if the payload can be delivered as any genuine ransomware:

I get sick and tired of users finding good excuses to download and open all sort of document on the main server at work and having to fetch a backup of the VM because of their eagerness to disregard all kind of obvious precaution.... At least with this I could organize a surprise training without jeopardizing their work of the last few hours/days.
Hiring a Tech Ops Team
It's more like we're too "wise" to work 80 hour weeks in perpetuity.

Yes, we learned that moderation is keeps things in balance, and we are going to choose not to work in that kind of environment.
I think it is better to think of it from the perspective that this code and this project is Apache, but any binaries that result from linking this code to that code are under GPL.