skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Predicting the winner of the 2016 US presidential election
I have set up a website for presidential election predictions (http://prespredict.com), and it is now up and running for the 2016 election. It uses daily state poll data and calculates the probability that each candidate will win. It also estimates the most likely number of electoral votes each candidate will get.

I originally did this back in 2008, and then applied this to the 2012 election. The methodology was also retroactively applied to the 2004 election using available state polls. In all three past elections, the calculation correctly predicted the winner. It also had a pretty good estimate of the number of electoral votes that each candidate ended up getting.

The approach and the website are not as fancy as 538.com but the results so far are pretty good. The methodology is explained here: http://prespredict.com/methodology.html.

It's a bit early and there are several caveats, including the accuracy of polls in the current political environment, the independence assumption in the model, the choice of the winning probability curve, etc. Since the predictions for the last three elections have been pretty accurate, I decided to leave the calculation as is, despite the presence of the caveats.

The website is automatically updated daily at 8am PST, so you can check back periodically.
Lee Priest Incredible Size Before the 2002 Olympia
Not from a browser and, AFAIK, only a browser idiotically marks files as coming from the internet.
I am luky as I got a microsoft account with my non ms email provider in the period that was allowed on xbox
I was under the impression that there was no way to stop VHS tapes degrading for every time you watch them. Or does that only apply to recording?

I remember taping music videos from MTV on VHS when I was a kid, like a mix tape of videos. And that tape was pretty worn out after just a few re-recordings, the quality was noticeably affected.
If you want/need a new job I'd tailor it for whatever I felt would be easiest to land while still being interesting enough to consider.

If you're not really looking I'd tailor it for whatever job I'd really really want. You never know, but even if that dream job isn't available a CV like that will emphazise what you're truly passionate about. It might lead to something great
I think it should be up to Adobe to come up with a solution here. Something like an Adobe AIR for the web.
On the other side of the NLP spectrum, what players out there are involved in NLG (natural language generation)? I've seen Arria and a couple other small projects, but I'm just starting to investigate the space and haven't found a whole lot yet.
One peculiar thing in the last few years of the VHS era, was that they were really cheap.

They were so much more mechanically complex than DVD players, but still as cheap as the cheap no name DVD players - although they must have been much more expensive to manufacture.

The margins must have been infinitesimal.
I know a lot of people who nowadays use only Messenger, not Facebook proper. Originally they were tied together, but Messenger is well executed communication service with huge network of people. Lots of utility value. Totally could survive alone.
I already admitted I was mistaken about the wall, and there is just a military cordon there instead.

As I asked in another post, does that negate my entire post?
I think that's almost the point, but it's a China reference rather than a Nazi one.
It's a mix. Corporate taxes end up affecting the customer, employee, supplier and shareholder.

Think about the two extremes: If taxes are 100% - the business goes under and everyone loses their jobs, suppliers lose a customer, customers lose a product they liked and shareholders lose everything.

If taxes are 0%, the business grows - shares become more valuable, the demand (and therefore price) for employees and suppliers increases, and customers will pay less.
I'm a big Musk fan and think the ambition of his current projects are incredible.

But, my fear with Tesla is that the AutoPilot stuff derails and ultimately kills the company. Not because it lands up being more dangerous than conventional driving but because of the bad image the media could/will paint of the technology as the number of crashes increases. Pushing forward electric cars is important, autonomous driving is going to happen with or without Telsa driving it forward, I don't think electric cars will happen without them getting out the Model 3 and growing their market share appreciably - it would be a shame for that mission to fail because of a feature that is essentially a development of established car technology (cruise control -> cruise control+ -> autonomous).

As an aside, if you've not read the articles on Wait But Why[1] on him then I highly recommend setting aside a few hours to do so as they give a clear (if biased) picture of what Musk has set out to do and why.

[1] http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-m...
For anyone else who wants to time the examples without copying & pasting each line:

python3 -m timeit -n 1 -r 3 -s "import re ; haystack = (' ' * 20000) + 'a'" -c "re.match('\s+$', haystack)"

1 loops, best of 3: 467 usec per loop

python3 -m timeit -n 1 -r 3 -s "import re ; haystack = (' ' * 20000) + 'a'" -c "re.search('\s+$', haystack)"

1 loops, best of 3: 4.23 sec per loop

Options

-n how many times to execute statement
-r how many times to repeat the timer
-s setup code (run once)
-c command to run n times
Humans are meant to be productive to society. If you do that by sitting in front of a computer all day then that isn't taking it too far.
Not much content there.

Musk's companies have consistently been late with getting product out the door. (Or, alternatively, they have a problem with top management setting unreasonable schedules.) When he announced that he wanted the Model 3 shipping at 500K units a year in 18 months, his top two production people quit.

The Model 3 will probably be late, and it will probably cost more than the presently announced price. But there's no reason it shouldn't ship.
And this is why GitLab stands out among all others. There's the no-compromises hardcore folks (more power to them/us!), and then there's the obnoxious whatever-for-business folks who don't care about community or ethics or feedback really. GitLab is amazing in just actually listening. Look at this, they went and took the suggestion and care more about honesty and transparency than in the short-term short-sighted impact of insisting their initial wording was right… this is typical of this company that really does listen. Bravo
As someone who just last night set up an Ubuntu 16.04 server with the intention of using ZFS, should I wait until this hits the Ubuntu repos? Is it possible to enable this encryption on an existing filesystem?
But won't the FBI also wait to make the grab when using filesystem encryption? We're not talking about some filesystem that uses unique passwords for every file.
That's the intention. The title is being facetious about Musk's denigrators.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

Referencing, also with the individual title, Chairman Mao.
Yes, I've encountered one form of the Curry-Howard correspondence before. Are you claiming that, via the Curry-Howard correspondence or some related phenomenon, the corresponding proof of a program used to compress a proof is the same (or at least, proves the same theorem) as the original proof that the program was meant to compress? That is interesting and I would appreciate if you could expand on it.
My rephrasing of their follow-up actions:

* "Audit our regular expressions and post
validation workflow for any similar issues"

* ==> "Not even people who've worked for years on the guts of regex engines can easily predict the runtime of a given regex, but somehow our engineers will be expected to do that".

* "Add controls to our load balancer to disable the healthcheck – as we believe everything but the home page would have been accessible if it wasn’t for the the health check"

* ==> "Our lb check was checking /index, that failed because /index was slow: Lesson learned, let's not lb check anything at all"
I frequently complete eBay feedback 'comments' fields[0] with a variety of Unicode spaces and Firefox at least doesn't seem to collapse them.

[0] eBay insists on something being entered and when it was a routine transaction with a vendor I seldom have anything useful to say.
Lots of people in the U.S. get married at City Hall, without ever setting foot in a church.

And if you make a will, you can pass on your property to anyone you want. Visiting someone in the hospital may be an issue, but there are legal documents like health care proxies that enable you to designate someone to make medical decisions for you if you can't do so yourself.
If you haven't yet read it, I highly recommend Greg Egan's short story "Learning to Be Me" (http://will.tip.dhappy.org/revolution/Technoanarchist/plan/....), a story with a similar take on this topic.
If you copy your brain digitally and let that run while you yourself die, there's no benefit to yourself. You still die. You don't get to experience longevity. What would live on is a copy of yourself that believes itself to be the same person as you were. Your yourself would have no continuity of thought.

What would be needed is some way of merging yourself with a digital replica of your brain while you're still alive. I can't even begin to imagine what that would be like.
My favorite part is people buying vinyl nowadays that come from digital masters (same as the CD/MP3 versions)—with none of the warmth of analog.
Iran: iHome with Decades of SeLoger and Zameen Experience
My blog post[1] on how to test for catastrophic backtracking using RegEx buddy.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/webdev/2010/11/15/avoiding-catastro...
Nah, four pages is really too long. As much as I agree with the notion that being prosaic has some punch, and that your CV is the only piece of marketing you'll ever be writing about yourself, the fact is that recruiters won't endure much more than a page per decade of experience. Plus one maybe. But not two or three, so methinks get to the point faster.
This 17-Year-Old Is Using AI to Better Diagnose Breast Cancer
>The criteria for adding content to the blocklist are:

>* Blocking the content will not be noticeable to the Firefox user.

>* It is possible to reimplement the basic functionality of the content in HTML without Flash.

There are three classes of content in the block list: Fingerprinting, Supercookie and Viewability. While I'm heard of various fingerprinting techniques besides Flash, I'm curious how "to reimplement without Flash the basic functionality" of supercookies, given its main feature is persistence despite of user's effort.
Apache Groovy's perfect for these kind of tasks where it doesn't need to be lightweight. Just don't use it for building actual applications -- build them in a decent typed language like Java, Scala, or Kotlin, then use Groovy as a multi-OS version of Bash to automate builds, tests, and runs.
A Little Travel Is a Dangerous Thing by D. Graham Burnett
You've described a very short algorithm for finding a very long proof. But what the algorithm finds is indeed a very long proof, not a short one, and the reason I say that is because the short algorithm description you gave doesn't convince me of the truth of the statement "Every coloring of positive integers up through 7825 contains a monochrome Pythagorean triple"; you could give similarly short descriptions of algorithms searching for hypothetical proofs of any number of false claims. It's only the long-ass step-by-step completed execution of that algorithm which does the convincing.
i dont know how it's today

back then we even ended up using surprisingly complex structures that actually are close to what you describe but clientside. as in: we didnt rely on classnames but often on positions next to some text.

```
find(SomeTitle).parent.parent.find(p[something]).text
```
Assuming they're still using ASP.net 4+, it is very unicode aware/safe. I don't know why a developer would reinvent Trim() but I do know it isn't a .Net limitation.
Care to expand on what you think that horrendous reasoning could be?
What is artificial intelligence, really?
What 18F projects are you excited about?

[Disclaimer: I work for 18F and will probably point those teams at this comment so they can do a happy dance!]
American?

Ford Madox Ford quotes a saying from the north of England: When land is gone and money spent/Then learning is most excellent.

The Prince of Hanover who just caused a shakeup in the Gottingen faculty said "Professors, dancing girls, and whores: you can hire them for money anywhere." (Except, as it turned out, when the professors have names like Grimm and Humboldt, maybe you can't.)

No doubt one could multiply the examples. If America is at all a special case, it is probably because things traditionally changed faster here, and yesterday's learning might not apply to today's situation.
You are making wide proclamations and generalizations with nothing to back them up, this is not the mark of someone with a deep understanding of the subject matter.

You're also all over the place, rather than concentrating on the point I made [physical presence]. What worked for decades, for some definition of worked -> debacles are numerous [when the Internet didn't even exist or wasn't as widely deployed/used as it is now] doesn't mean it is best _today_. This is a fool's argument, also see what Taleb has to say about tail events.

Moreover, the OPSEC details of most successful groups and individuals that use the Internet to communicate, will by definition, rarely become public. We can learn by example from failures but we can't learn by example from success _unless we are insiders_.

I said the particulars in the Bin Laden case are important and made cyber hard to use. That doesn't mean trusted couriers and physical storage are a good idea for the rest of us.

Re: Snowden

You yourself said you were using comms embedded in HTTPS to avoid sticking out like a sore thumb, how do Snowden docs contradict what I said? Read [and try to comprehend] my post again please.

To reiterate, I think domain expertise gives individuals a certain degree of confidence and a solid knowledge base that they can use to build their OPSEC strategies. What would you gamble your life on if you had to, meatspace domain expertise [with a huge number of totally unknown factors/capabilities] or Internet [some unknown factors but also lots of remedies]?

For most of us the answer is obvious.

When I go out, I can never be confident I'm not being followed, recorded in various ways or leaking biometric evidence. Online, I can operate with an assumption of full compromise _and still come up with useful OPSEC strategies_.
tangential argument identified, watch out for this angular hater who appears slightly off topic.
I have used them.

We had a system that generated millions of images and needed to be sure that from one version to the next the images produced by a given request were the same, and also have some diagnostic data in case of problematic images. The images could be either JPG or PNG and we needed a unified way to associate arbitrary metadata with them.

We had a special mode that would store an equivalent of the request in an alternate data stream of the image. When a problem was detected we would open the alternate data stream and test the request manually.
I agree with you. Plus, if you use Cloudflare, your server may not even take the burden of the request. They will do the caching of static content for you.
Hi Fapjacks. I'm on the talent team at 18F. Feel free to email me directly at amanda.schonfeld@gsa.gov. We don't have a direct phone number for folks to call, but I will definitely email you back. :)
Ship-board drone systems are likely to be the standard deterrent here. A small swarm of these things capable of sounding an alarm and launching a flare over the detected craft would give you a lot more time to prepare your defenses.

These things show up on thermal imaging quite well, so finding them is not the problem. It's having systems that constantly scan and can alert reliably in the case of a problem with sufficient warning time that's tricky.
Caught a spammer in the act
This is the right way. It's too easy to bork everything otherwise; yesterday I borked a new build server because I set security up to disallow anonymous access, which lead to the main page returning a 302 redirect to the login page and thereby failed the load balancer health check.

You live and learn.
Regex engines usually have an option to set upper limit on the time they take to match so they don't end up in expensive loops. A simple solution could be to setup such time limits.
For reading directly from a program's memory, have you tried using Cheat Engine/scanmem to find the location of the variables you're looking for? I think that'd be easier than using IDA.
Thanks for sharing your insights. Tailoring the executive summary for the job opening seems like a good idea. I guess I could treat movement from cover letter to summary to the rest of the resume as a conversion process, convincing the reader to invite me for an interview :)
This totally explains my early, only, very bad experience with training wheels. I went right out into the street because I turned the wrong way and my friend (who had the training wheel bike) thought I knew nothing about riding bikes. I just learned without training wheels...
The homepage makes a compelling case for migrating to pass(1).

But, I'd like to see a review that isn't self-authored.

Oh, here we go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7495337
Unlike block encryption, filesystem encryption doesn't have to be all-or-none; you can have lots of different keys, unlock on a directory-by-directory basis, whatever. There's room for arbitrary metadata. If you're using your computer at all, block encryption is unlikely to help you.

I'm not saying any particular extant system does those things; I'm just saying they're a possibility for filesystems and foreclosed for device-level encryption.
Links vs. Buttons in Modern Web Applications
Scoot, Age 7, Builds a Conversational Chatbot
I find it amazing how he has hacked all of this. Well done.

As a non-hacker some of the similar results i've found has been philips hue and lightpack (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/woodenshark/lightpack-2...)
That's a nice approach. Will copy :)
Complaining loudly and making a repo inaccessible are two different things.

I didn't mean that I should be able to build/run/etc things in the repo that rely on the special filename and magically expect it to work. But my this behavior would make me unable to even look at the repo and perform normal git operations, regardless what it actually contains:

If you interpret "refuse to write the file" as a fatal error, I wouldn't even be able to clone the repo because the clone process would fail.

If you interpret it as non-fatal, I could browse the repo, but would always have a non-clean working set with a "deletion" I cannot undo. This means I cannot pull, rebase or checkout anything. (Unless I actually commit the deletion and remind myself not to push it. On every single branch.)

In no scenario can I access the contents of the file, even if I don't care about the filename at all. Even if I would like to fix the filename issue, I couldn't do so from a Windows pc.

That's why I think a solutions using escaping (and highly visible warnings in git status) are better. Yes, your scripts will still break but you have at least a chance to fix the mess.
Tesla's problem is Musk denying that they have a problem. That's not flying.

Tesla needs to immediately issue an over the air update so that after 5 seconds of hands-off-wheel, the vehicle starts to slow down. That will keep the driver in the loop.

Longer-term, the radar blind spot at windshield height has to be fixed. They need a vision system and control system which doesn't treat "unrangeable uniform surface" as "no obstacle". And the system should have a database of limited access highways and refuse to engage on anything else. What Tesla has is only good enough for freeway driving, and it needs to refuse to operate on anything else.
Proxmark Pro: Proxmark3 Without a PC
Apply soon! We're hungry for help.

[Disclaimer: I work at 18F.]
I agree with both of you. I didn't mean to imply it was just any random franchise agreement that made the difference and that there were no improvements to gameplay. The integration with the pokemon world and improved game play accessibility are two things that made working with that franchise in particular brilliant. Working with the Star Wars franchise would not have been brilliant. Although with the success of pokemon go I expect there will be a lot more themed games in the future.
How Mountains Obscured by Venus’s Clouds Reveal Themselves
yes, let's get rid of the FDA too. The Onus is on customers to inform themselves of the quality and origin of their food. Buyer Beware baby!
But doesn't that happen anyway through normal repairs that happen at the subcellular level? I have a feeling that I'm not really the same person as from years ago, I'm just some bloke who thinks he is.
Ask HN: Troubleshooting slow Wifi?
A friend of mine approached me with his Wifi troubles ("you're a tech guy right?"). I would love to help, but apart from changing Wifi channels, identifying bottlenecks using e.g. "traceroute" or Wireshark, I don't really know how to proceed.

Thanks for your help.
That video shows what Japanese think Americans are like?
To for one: Hubble picks out pair of Earth-sized planets' atmospheres – LA Times
Google Performs First Scalable Quantum Simulation of Molecular Energies
The again, some great VCs I've seen included a section that was explicitly called "Keyword Stuffing". Sign of the times... If CVs weren't scanned using keyword search things might be different, but it's unfortunatly only going to get worse in the short term.
Terrifying Dreams Could Be Rehearsal for Real Life
750 000 units per year still looks like a decent figure. At $100 a piece they'd still be making $75M in sales...
See also: http://www.condmatjournalclub.org/?p=2853, and https://research.googleblog.com/2016/07/towards-exact-quantu...
It wasn't actually that hard (or at least the learning curve was smooth), I only have a few months' experience with hardware. Plus, it was extremely fun!
Thank you for the kind words!
Which is still a bizarre claim. If anything is "the vinyl of analog video recording", it's actual film on reels, not videotape. It's more accurate to say that VHS is the compact cassette of analog video recording.
Yes, I tried that too, but it's hard for me to find the location of something like a color, which changes every frame. I know that people have done it, I'm just not aware of an efficient way to find something that you don't know the value of or how it changed.

If you have any tips, please share, because that would be very useful for this project.
This part made me chuckle:

Twitter had published an application programming interface (API) for its service. Using the API, I wrote some software to automate the posting, such that everything would be timed correctly. I just had to push a button and watch. We named the project “Twittering Rocks.”

It ran successfully in 2007, and thanks to the software, it would be easy to run Twittering Rocks every Bloomsday. Which we did, in 2008, and 2009, and 2010. Then it broke completely and hasn’t worked since.

It broke, surprisingly, not because Twitter arbitrarily decided to screw developers. It was because of the migration to OAuth, which, if memory serves, just happened to coincide with the beginning of the period in which Twitter decided 3rd-party devs were screwable.

The conclusion nonetheless is apt:

How many apps on your phone don’t work properly anymore? Software breaks all the time.

But books don’t.
HackerOne kicks off Hack the World competition