skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Backstory: outsourcing our election administration to corporations. With the business model switching from bulk rates to per voter (whether they voted or not). That's the driver for all these disruptive changes.

With paper based precinct voting, perhaps 20% of the work is done outside. Mostly printing, ballots, pamphlets, poll books. But also buying some simple gear, like the optical (scanotronic style) scanners or punchcards (whatever is used).

Adding touchscreens to the mix outsourced more stuff.

With postal balloting, I'd estimate 50-60% is outsourced. For more printing. Signature matching. Ballot image scanners. A lot of bookkeeping software.

With internet voting, closer to 100% of the elections will be outsourced. What jurisdiction is sophisticated enough to build, run, maintain voting systems? None. So every jurisdiction will be like the state of Georgia, where all of election administration is conducted by a corporation.

--

Buddy of mine is trying to sell me on blockchain voting. Claims it'll protect privacy via some kinda tor like onion routing whatever.

I don't even care.

If we adopt some magical crypto voting system that actually work for our form of elections (unlikely), we'll completely forfeit the primary function of our governments, which is administrating elections.

Private voting and public counting will be gone.
It is my first time hearing the term soft robot and had a hard time realising what a "soft" robot means as "robot" is hardwired to mechanical and electronic parts in my mind. After reading the article, absolutely eye opening!
Jan constructs an enormous box around the entire country of Kleptopia, and places his own padlock on it from the inside. Then he mails the ring with no additional security measures.

The problem is fatally flawed by not explicitly stating that boxes locked with padlocks are also not stolen, despite not being enclosed in a padlocked box.
Original source: https://www.bu.edu/research/articles/single-photon-avalanche...
> `Should we be worried`

I don't understand why that's in the headline outside of being clickbait. The article itself mentions that meetings of the DNSSEC key holders are quarterly and regular, and that the hardware involved in the actual key rollover complies to the highest level specified by FIPS-140 (presumably actually FIPS-140-2).

I don't believe there's reason to be worried; the ICANN has historically taken reasonable precautions to ensure the safety of such meetings and exchanges.
Ask HN: If I wanted to make a web browser, where would I start?
Why? Nothing indicates that this is illegal?
Tbox v1.5.3 released
There is an unending amount that has been written about measuring happens and finding happiness etc... All of it seems to boil down to what I would consider "hedonism with a mortgage." The focus is on "lasting happiness" with relationships and experiences being there paramount, and de-emphasizes material accumulation and intoxication.

Nothing ever asks the question "why be happy anyway?"

Seems like it's as bad of a goal as any, but it's how our biological systems create action.
What is MSM ? I keep seeing it, google hasn't helped.
Well then we will enter the era of constant populism. And politicians having permanently to validate everything against an every shifting public opinion. We will be rules by the press then, by clickbait headlines and populistic extremes I fear.

I do not believe, that people are able to vote for the longer term greater good if they are able to vote for everything in an instant.
In three hours?
"and you're not cool if you don't drive a Tesla"

Woe to the bicycle commuter, I suppose.

Also, I think you forget there are huge chunks of the world where this is utterly untrue.
If a company can't produce a paystub with a paycheck, I doubt that they are handling accounting and taxes properly.

Paystubs don't need to come from ADP. They can be typed up or even hand-written if you want. But they demonstrate, and record, that the company is fulfilling its legal obligations as an employer, and give the employee the information the employee needs to fulfill their legal obligations as a taxpayer.
One major reason for this is that the load for these users is usually constant and predictable. The load at a fast charging station would necessarily be spiky and most likely bimodal (going to/from work, I'd imagine), so their cost wouldn't go down as much as, say, a steel forge with massive arc furnaces.
This was on the front page yesterday

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12376695
Would one be able to write efficient solvers for semidefinite programming using Simit?
Wrote and implemented 5 regional healthcare information exchanges. My team shared this assumption.
Show HN: A better way to browse HN/Reddit
Azov are kind of right-wing (although not outright "nazi"), but this judgement is not (and should not be) based on how their insignia looks. And also, Azov has no connection to Parubiy at all (Azov just reused that unlucky old logo out of the blue).

There is a cultural difference in what Ukrainians and Russians mean when they say "nation". In Ukraine, when you say "nation" you mean basically the same as what a USA president would mean under this word. But in Russia, the word "nation" is considered to be synonymous with "nazi", and is generally avoided.
Transform CSV into mongoDB documents
WW3 TURKEY WARNS OBAMA,PULL BACK
hi, i'm tony from the death laser satellites team. we really do care, but we also don't exist.
I blogged about coming up with an idea for my latest project last week: https://www.indiehackers.com/blog/how-to-come-up-with-a-busi...

At some point, I narrowed a list of 40+ idea down to 4, and then I picked one. I used a somewhat formal process to help me out, and that was to evaluate each idea based on a checklist of 7 requirements:

1. Do people need this? (i.e. have I identified a niche that I'm very confident will love what I build)

2. Can I personally do a good job marketing and distributing it? (i.e. do I know where the target customers hang out online and am I sure I can get the word out about my product there)

3. How hard will it be to avoid churn and keep retention high? (i.e. is the product set-it-and-forget-it, or at least somewhat naturally re-engaging? or will it require lots of effort from users' to keep using)

4. Is it meaningful and beneficial to the world? (i.e. will I enjoy working on it for years to come)

5. How long will it take me to build an MVP? (i.e. do I have time for this now)

6. What kind of effort will it take to keep it running long-term? (i.e. will I have time for this later)

7. Can this idea actually generate revenue? (i.e. do I have a business model in mind that has been proven to work for this kind of idea in the past)

My advice to you is to come up with a similar checklist, run through your ideas, give each a score, and go with the highest one!
Here is a different take on the subject tptacek.

It is unlikely that NYT is ordered to produce stories according to the current administration's liking. Broadly in the West we don't go in for that sort of thing and one hopes we never will.

We don't like being told what to think. The trouble though, is that all ideas have to come from somewhere.

The power of Western style propaganda is that the government does not have to orchestrate it as intensely as in autocracies. It happens automatically because they live and breathe the same air. The relationship is more symbiotic.

If you have real power, you can afford not to be petty. That is the same deal as with the Joker in the medieval court with the King. A government official only kills journalists were they a real threat to his power. If you punish people for a small degree of insolence it is because you are not secure in your power and any provocation could be used to coordinate an attack to displace you. Being 'above' that is a tacit demonstration of power and stability (a good thing!).

What is the practical difference between the information printed by the New York Times and the opinions of the State Department?

I cannot think of any. Any divisions I see are also expressed within the government itself. So they must be coordinated. But is it really from government to media?

The neo-reactionary take is basically the exact reverse of this:

"The New York Times is not in fact an instrument of the US Government."

That's not as whack-a-doodle as it at first sounds. The New York Times is the mouth of a much larger network they refer to as the Cathedral, just as Christianity is not just the physical Vatican City.

This is not necessarily an 'evil' to vanquish, but it does mean if the NYT is misguided on some subject, then it invariably also means the government too is running into the same dead end.

The long and short of it is that the press and the government sup from the same pool of propaganda while they generate it, they believe in their own manufactures. I hope this makes sense to you.
'No'
I don't know. The very next sentence is:

> We worked through Christmas, and were given no time off for the holidays. Our boss, being a kind soul, offered us New Year’s Eve as a consolation.

AFAICT, Christmas hasn't come yet.
Is Satya Nadella Hurting Microsoft in the Long-Run?
https://tradiio.com :)
EasyPost is more hiring backend and frontend engineers
Apparently there is no product...
You are right, but we can also agree on a common query sequence in advance that doesn't use the 'results' of the queries. What about using what we find makes this so much more efficient?
Python vs. C/C++ in embedded systems
Publishing guidance around best practice should be mandatory when dealing with government infrastructure,
these election systems are not "low level" target they can potentially influence the course of history if they are rigged.
In Elon Musk, we trust!
> the political class needs an enemy to unite the populace against.

Bingo. It's a distraction. They hope if we're focused on Russia we won't notice or remember the crimes being committed by our own government and the EU. They're a convenient scapegoat. Or so they think. They don't yet realize that screaming "RUSSIAN SPIES!" every few days makes them look like they're having 60's flashbacks like a mental patient.
I heartily agree with your sentiment "rollback one of those inherently complex ideas" :) It's true that sometimes it's not even well-defined, such as for database migrations.

Some of this also depends on context. If I'm shipping a single primary deployment of a massive fairly monolithic SaaS product, I can do this time-marches-on stuff. If I'm actually shipping shrinkwrapware -- and as a sibling comment says, doing rolling blue-green deploys also looks like this, if briefly -- switching something back to a previous code version is very worth minding.
...I think they mean 'should we be worried' that DNS will break due to the change. The article didn't really answer that though, instead just outlines the ceremony that takes place.

Does the key change frequently?
One that I heard last week:
There is an 8x8 checkerboard in a room with a coin placed on each square. Each coin is either facing heads or tails up, and the face is determined randomly. Before you can inspect the board, a "master" comes in, picks a square of interest, and must make a manipulation to the board by flipping one of the 64 coins. He then exits the room. You are now allowed to enter, and must read out which square of interest the master chose by inspecting the state of the board. There is a strategy that is guaranteed to work for all possible configurations of the board.
lol, great notice!
If it is as they claim well academically supported, you'd assume they'd be easily able to get a subhuman on someone's
.edu or.ac.uk or whatever
Make something you need yourself, as it gives you insight into making a good product, and likely others will need it too. Worse case, you made something that makes/saves you money even if it doesn't scale.
My tinfoil-hat wearing twin would like to claim that groundwork is being laid for a massive election fraud this november.
I think algebra actually hurts learning of programming, at least of the BASIC/FORTRAN/C style syntax. Programming variables don't work like algebra variables. I learned programming before algebra and had no problem with statements like "X=X+1". My brother on the other hand learned algebra before learning programming and a statement like that made no sense to him (what, 0 = 1?). Of course this was because in BASIC (as in many other languages) "=" is used both for assignment and comparison.
If you roll on your competitors, you can do quite well for a very long time: https://www.google.com/#q=phillip+morris+stock
> How was Jessica involved in fraud?

> You have no evidence of that.

> The story did not imply it either.

I agree with you that there should be NO witch hunting. Just to clarify Jessica's part in the fraud, she was one of the people vocal about outing the founders after not being paid for over a month. For some reason, she suddenly changes her mind. She starts erasing any evidence of OP doing work and The CEO fires her with cause claiming that he has evidence she's not been doing work. Jess is promoted with a raise and changes her title to CMO.

Now, maybe this is just a bitch move, but if Jess is willingly participating in the CEO's scheme to fire OP with cause, I feel like this is crossing the line into fraud. Again, witchhunting is wrong, but just clarifying Jess's part in the fraud (if it counts as fraud)
If only WebTorrent (https://github.com/feross/webtorrent) worked with standard bittorrent protocol instead of a custom one on top of WebRTC, we would have live access to all the papers and "displayable" data directly instead of firing up a torrent downloader just for a small file.
Yeah, it's an old chestnut:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic)

Spivak has a version of it in his Calculus book, phrased as 17 (heh!) professors who must resign if a flaw is found in their published work (hehehe), and all have a flaw in their papers, known to each other except each author.
Long shot, but you might be interested in http://repeatr.io/ -- it's a tool for our brave-new-container-world intended to make it easy (or at least easier) to suss out reproducible builds.

Or to answer your direct question: "no", it's definitely not just you who's afraid of that :)
What could have they done in this situation?
Russia isn't being set up for another cold war unfortunately, it's being set up for a very very hot war.

The US has ABM in Europe, Japan, Alaska and anywhere within 500 miles of an ocean.

While the current generation of US ABM systems isn't sufficient to counter the current nuclear arsenal of Russia within about 10 years it would be there.

Russia has either to develop an ABM shield of it's own which is both geographically and financially not feasible for them to do, or to develop new delivery mechanism and increase its warhead count to counteract the ABM.

Russia's moves in renewing their nuclear arsenal pushes even more efforts, resources and political capital into US and NATO ABM deployments and development.
So the situation ends being a feedback loop which makes the situation worse and worse and worse.

Sadly Russia with 50,000 nuclear warheads with stealth, ECM, and decoy countermeasures capabilities is the good outcome of current policy, the bad outcome is that Russia loses the race and they cannot provide an asymmetrical answer to the ABM which forces them to strike first while they still can.

It appears we don't need SkyNet for judgement day we just need congress with a hardon for ballistic missile defense and defense contractors that want to make a buck.
I think TDD for beginners works if you approach it from a different angle. The teacher should already have a TDD suite ready that the student then verifies against. This is how several of my college classes approached assignments. The only issue I had at the very beginning was not understanding that we shouldn't modify the tests ;)
Not a complete solution, but if you use a third-party client like Tweetbot (on iOS & Mac) or Fenix (Android) you should be able to setup a variety of mute filters, for example by keyword or hashtag. Putting Trump & Hillary as mute filters is one of the quickest ways to make your tweetstream more sane.

I still tweet sometimes about Eurovision, which I know must annoy many of my followers, so I try to use the hashtag on every Eurovision related post so that others can mute it if they're not interested. (I guess I should do the same for infosec & coding, so Eurovision fans who aren't into the tech stuff can mute those too.)
Your link is bullshit.

Go read it: do you see any differentiation between urban and rural people at all? Do you see any differentiation between different regions of the nation? If the answer is no, then it's all bullshit. It's like trying to look for trends among programming language usage by averaging in ALL computer users. Since most computer users don't write any software at all, the clear trend is that no significant number of people use Python, Java, C++, C#, or really any programming language at all, so we should just cut off support for programming languages.
Why am I doing a sweeping generalization? I really liked most Americans I met. Also there are some places that really interest me. I just do not approve of US politics and other issues and therefore will try to not visit them. The interest in the places does not weight higher in my personal prioritization. Thats all. Others might weight differently - and that is totally fine.

Btw. same goes for example for Russia, Turkey and a lot of other countries.

On the other hand - in some countries the negatives are out-weighted by my interest in visiting this country. Greece for example (and I do see lots of things that are very bad there).
Nothing about DNSSEC should concern you other than the prospect that it might someday actually be deployed.

http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/01/15/against-dnssec/
No, it doesn't change frequently. The article mentions that this is the first time it's changing.
You could; that would be better. Such a contract would have to surrender some control to the other co-owner; in effect, you've given something away, while you were alive. Trusts do a similar thing; the Duke of Westminster just "inherited" a large chunk of London, but he can't just do whatever he wants with it (that said, it is clearly tilted way too far in his favour).

I've no doubt some people would try to cheat the system, but that requires the taxman to look the other way; we already have situations in which people have tried to cheat by obeying the law in paperwork only, and a taxman paying attention can get them.

There already are cases in which people try to come up with clever contracts to attempt to dodge inheritance tax, and the taxman has been known to tear it up.
I'm not sure if the author really understands just how irrelevant DNSSEC is as of right now.
But those solutions cost money too, many people A) dont have access to a garage and/or B) a garage with 220 AC in it. That changes charging time significantly, and installing 220 is expensive. There are solutions but it all adds to the price of an electric car.
That's a stupid statement. There's no religion involved there, only culture. And who are you to tell the people of a whole nation that their culture is wrong, and that they should abandon it and adopt someone else's culture?
Isolate Side Effects in Ruby
I wasn't sure if carbontax.org was a good site, but then saw a number of the founders worked for Move NY, and upon googling them, I found that they are fighting for congestion pricing in NY. Which signals to me that they get it.
Teenagers ask banal but seemingly profound questions like this all the time. The answer is "because it feels better than not being happy."

You can really overthink this stuff pretty easily
If you're not already tuned into Harvey Karp's "Happiest Baby" method for baby sleep and soothing. Get the DVD, it works wonders > http://www.babycenter.com/0_harvey-karps-happiest-baby-metho...

Additionally, suggest reading up on Polyphasic Sleep-- in order for YOU to survive the first several months, build naps into your schedule > http://fourhourworkweek.com/gear/#uberman
Actually I think you'll find more resistance to the new technology than anything. West Virginia is not doing so hot economically, the coal industry has been going downhill [0]. Do you hear of training centers popping up? No, everyone is up in arms about their jobs leaving. They're calling it a "war on coal".

Now try that at a global level, I'm betting entire countries would have their life styles completely altered. Who knows, maybe entire currencies would become worthless in the process. Would it eventually even out where everyone could do well. Yeah, probably, but would people let you see the plan play out?

I hope someday that yes, we could stop fighting over resources and come togehter as a world to ensure we all have what we need. This is one area that I wonder if we can change in time.

[0] http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/us-has...
I don't think you understand how WebTorrent works. WebTorrent in fact works with the regular BitTorrent network if you run it from node, and falls back to use WebRTC when used in the browser.

So you can seed those torrents directly in the browser with something like instant.io.
Right, we only enforce the _order_ of message delivery, not the _time_ of deliver. I.e., consider the sequence of messages received on each peer, these sequences each respect a global, total order on all messages. But there are no timestamps on them, and no way to compare sequences from separate peers.
> What if you were in a simulation so that it seemed like you were doing all these things with other people, but you knew that you are in a simulation all alone? Would these things still have meaning? Would the experience be worthwhile?

If it is in fact a perfect simulation, and you as the actor in said simulation cannot detect a tear in the fabric of the simulated reality, you will, in due time, repress any prior knowledge of said previous "reality" by integrating it with your reality i.e. rationalizing it as a dream. As there would not be any discernible difference between being real and feeling real, any worthwhile experience would, by definition, be worthwhile.
Autism and inclusion: time to be open minded?
Yet another site that confuses an ad blocker with a privacy guard. Is there some kind of pre-canned explanation or site I can point them at?
Perhaps slightly off topic, but I recall that the LibreSSL guys dropped FIPS entirely[1] due to technical and political concerns.

With that in mind, shouldn't meeting those specifications be seen as an antipattern?

[1]: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=139819485423701&w=2

And relevant HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7634964
Realistic? My personal opinion is unrealistic and allows for others to make fun of?

q.e.d.
Because there's evidence. The same way there's evidence of ransomware and other malware industries being propped up by Russia, Russia cheating in the Olympics, Putin murdering journalists and rivals, Putin annexing parts of Ukraine, Putin powering the eastern conflict in Ukraine, Putin purposely bombing US aligned rebels in Syria, etc, etc. All these things were denied by Russia and Russophiles. And that's on top of Russia's incredibly corrupt economic system, where 35% of the wealth in Russia belong to about 100 people.

I think a lot of Russophiles are getting the big dose of reality we've been warning about for quite some some. I don't think how its even possible to start giving Russia this benefit of the doubt considering its leadership's recent actions and the evidence we have. If you think Russia doesn't have a non-stop cyberwar with us then I've got a bridge to sell you.
We've updated the link from http://sciencenewsjournal.com/new-soft-robot-completely-auto... to the Harvard release page. There was also a previous submission which got a good number of upvotes, but not much discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12341843.
Best programming language to learn in 2016? You already know the answer