skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The workings of voting computers are opaque to a large part of the voting population. The sad thing here is that this certification process actually sounds quite good if you do not understand the technical details. In my opinion, voting machines are more trouble than they are worth, simply because of the loss of understanding of the workings of the voting process.

That said, it is always interesting to read analyses like this.
> Corporations don't want things

Indeed they don't need roads, rails, fire departments, police departments, etc. Corporations don't exist in a vacuum.

Let's have a deal: we abolish the taxes if they don't use any these.

You might say: but citizens already pay for this! True. However, if you abolish taxes for companies then citizens will have to pay more for public services. You might say: but we will increase their wages. I say ok then, let's make it part of the deal: a decent minimal wage.
People say it's the best hole all the time.
Nutraloaf
Thank you for illustrating my (apparently unpopular) point.
We must not accept the consensus of experts that says there was no hacking or fraud.

We must accept the consensus of experts that there is climate change.

Cognitive dissonance much?
found it pretty toxic and regressive when she talked about explaining stuff to her boyfriend likes he's 5. idk if i'll ever be able to relate to all the emotional stuff she talked about.
The last of the communist monsters is dead.
Science doesn’t rely on luck, but success in science can’t do without it
Okay I haven't spent very long thinking this through but if we think lower corporation taxes wouldn't lead to an increase in staff earnings (which I completely agree would be the case and for the article to suggest that is offensive) then why not change the corporation tax laws so that it'd be banded? The average salary across the whole organisation that people earn (with different bands for different sizes of businesses to prevent small groups of people making up shell businesses) are then factored into different corporation tax rates.

You could financially incentivise companies to reward their workers, a big business giving its staff generous salaries could then pay almost no tax.. Then you go after the individual's tax instead.

I'm sure there's flaws in this but I think the premise of financially incentivising companies to pay better wages could make the lower corporation tax idea more credible than just expecting it'll magically happen.
My mom grew up in a time before computers and never really acclimated to technology. The things that frustrate her the least are her Amazon Echo and Chromebook.

The echo is used as a glorified speaker: I set it up with their Prime account and it plays all the music she could ever want through voice commands. For some reason she finds it hard to use Siri on her phone, but something about the blue light on the Echo makes it really obvious what's going on. Also, the small things make her happy like asking about the weather or the news.

The Chromebook is nice because it's super hard to mess up - you just install an adblocker and you're good to go. For someone who only uses the computer to surf the web, it's perfect. The best part is I don't have to play tech support anymore :)

I don't think I'd get either of those things for myself, but I'd definitely recommend them for your non-technical family members.
White-beaked dolphins trapped in the ice and eaten by polar bears
This thread is full of obvious cases of toxicity.
As outrageous as this is, it's missing the forest for the trees.

For voting machines to be "secure", not only would there have to be a serious software audit, but also a serious hardware audit (as hardware could otherwise override software). Then you'd have to somehow make sure that it was the said software and no other that was actually running on the hardware. Then you'd have to make sure that the machines were tamper-proof. All of this would have to be done by multiple auditors from each political party.

You'd have to do this for each of the thousand or tens of thousands of voting machines out there. Then you'd have to do the same for the vote counting machines, which are as if not more important than the individual voting machines.

All of this complexity is ridiculous, and taken together I'm sure there'll still be plenty of zero-day vulnerabilities after even serious audits of all of the above.

Just use pen and paper instead.
GoPro Hero3 vs GoPro Hero5 Session
Can you please provide some examples?
Like SICP, the text of the book is online (http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/ if you didn't already know), so people more likely link to that than to Amazon.
It paints a bizarre picture of people running from and being killed by waves of gooey, molten sugar, hence a story of interest to the general public, yet one based in science and engineering.
Surprised Code Complete isn't there, nor mentioned here in the comments as being missing!
You could say that about anything that isn't personal income tax. There's nothing about personal income tax that makes it any more authentic than any other kind of tax. The federal government spent most of its existence supported by other forms of taxation, without a personal income tax. An equally valid argument (though it still wouldn't be true) could be made that we should just abolish personal income tax and have nothing but corporate taxes.
It is never right to attribute negative characteristics to an entire race or gender. Anyone who does so under any circumstances will find me speaking in opposition.

--------------

EDIT in Reply:

1. Your comment is, however unintentionally, quite interesting.

Never have I seen someone so self-righteously accuse another of self-righteousness. The closest analogy I can devise is an infinite regression of ignorance, a perfectly formed fractal of feces. Maintaining that level of willful lack of self-awareness must be exhausting.

My goodness.

2. Overt racism is a heuristic I use to determine whether to take a person's other viewpoints seriously. This article did not pass that test.
Interesting that Pinochet wasn't named still here.
It is a good use of reduce (accumulate as I call it), but maybe slightly overkill for this case compared to a simple iteration or a max function.
sad that these people focus on complaining about women getting jobs when they could just focus on being better than the worst man with a job. reason they don't have one isn't because women took their spot but because they're worse than the 90 pct chunk that are men that got the job
An expert’s view on unusually warm Arctic temperatures
The agony of WWII and its collaborators is still within living memory, as is life under the Soviet bloc with its secret police and disappearing people, likewise wars of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. There are also several large secessionist movements where people actually want to secede, unlike in the US, where that kind of talk is rhetorical[1]. I don't think that kind of blanket statement of 'higher trust societies' can be made; the situation is a lot more nuanced.

For that matter, I think that Americans had a lot more trust in their government before the last couple of decades.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_separatist_move...
Zapcc – A (much) faster C++ compiler
Estate taxes are one of the least evil taxes; they are inherently more fair, because they reduce unearned income.
"The value of a caching compiler should really become apparent in incremental builds, as in rebuilding after changing a single file. Yet the author talks about "not seeing any improvements"."

There are millions of reasons this may not be true in C++.
For starters, the use of time and date macros, etc.

Without precise dependency tracking of what source lines are dependent on what macros (which is super hard, and i don't think they do), which is not usually what is done (dependency tracking is often much more coarse grained), you may not see an improvement.

VisualAge C++ was one of the best incremental C++ implementations i ever saw, and even it did not get to this level.
That's exactly why software engineering is more attractive than hardware engineering though?

A condescending comment would be something like: "Maybe you should stick to your pretty R graphs for 'journalism' and leave discussion of software engineering to the professionals who actually get paid to build systems and who haven't, as a profession, fucked up on every metric in the last decade even without including the most recent election."

That would be a condescending comment--the one you are remarking on can be interpreted as "hey, designers get to make pretty things unfettered by layers of shaky abstractions and stupid imposed by business and deadlines".

Please don't rush to aid the theoretically aggrieved; especially when there are folks in this same subthread going "yep, as a designer, that's the truth".
String is a type alias for a lazy linked list of characters: not very high performance, but easy to work with using all the basic list manipulation tools.

Text is a compact and efficient representation, more similar to strings in other languages.

As far as learning libraries: its not mandatory and you can code as well as anywhere else without them, but the "language enhancing libraries" are undeniably useful, and can do some incredibly useful things. Monad transformers let you merge computational contexts, Conduit lets you cleanly define stream transformations, Lens lets you manipulate specific aspects of some state in a context, etc.
Unix Power Tools. The Unix is large.

Effective Computation in Physics. Has a surprisingly good coverage of the python development cycle.

Python for Data Analysis. Pandas.
I just focused on the software side of the certification process in this discussion. The hardware analysis is actually not horrible. But there's no discussion about physical break-ins to alter ballots, whereas there's plenty of discussion about hacking and malfeasance.

Agree with paper ballots. Validation should be default part of process.
It would be funny if they did a second part where they turned the hole into a pool and just filled it with money. Sounds like something they'd do.
http://www.nuclearphynance.com/ and

https://forum.wilmott.com/

for quant topics

https://www.bloombergbriefs.com/hedge-funds/

for hedge fund specific coverage.

If you want some specific questions answered, please feel free to contact me.
It's an advertisement for their card game disguised as postmodern art.
I would posit that's the main difference between a craftsman and an engineer. A craftsman pours his heart and soul into his work and aims for perfection. An engineer, on the other hand, has to work within certain constraints, such as time and budget.

Of course, the definition of "perfect" is different for everyone. The point is that craftsmen can wait until they're fully satisfied with what they are working on before releasing it. Engineers don't have that luxury.
> A guy who knows how to fix a car is not going to have any easier of a time launching a successful business than a guy who knows how to build an app or website. If anything, I would think it would be easier for the tech.

That's patently ridiculous. We know how to market auto mechanic shops. All the knowledge is there, you can even go to a library to read about it. Nothing about the industry has changed so drastically in the last fifty years that you have to throw out the book.

Small business marketing and economics are so simple and well-understood that your grandma can start a catering business, and, so long as she follows the formula, can guarantee she won't starve. She can listen to the banks and the accountants and the lawyers and be confident she's getting good advice.

Ask your grandma to start a website. Nothing about that space is well-understood to the point where she can have any reasonable amount of confidence in any course of action she decides to take. Sure there's forums, there's books, but the landscape changes so often that you have to treat everything as if it's already outdated.

It never fails to amaze me how often people immersed in technology seems to catch Stockholm Syndrome every time they think about business in this space. It's hard. The fact that there's zillions of choices makes it harder and not easier. The fact that you can do whatever you want makes it harder and not easier.
TRUMP for “A Little While” (Official Trailer)
> But that’s where the anger ended, in not being white or a man or coding since I was two or some combination of the three. This wasn’t going to work. Coding wasn’t going to work. I didn’t belong.

What's interesting is that white men, with no gender or racial bogeyman to hide behind, have created the term "imposter syndrome" to explain feelings that are almost universal in this field, and also very evident in this woman's essay. You don't belong. You don't think like them. Your mind is different. If only you programmed since you were 5 on your family's Amiga.

It's sad for me to see gender and race become the focus of her disappointment in her career. In a twisted way it puts even more distance between her and other engineers who invariably feel the same way but are trying to cope with it on their own.

Maybe she's worried they'll "say wrong things, and then I have to explain why those things are wrong" ...
If Clang had used a GPL-like license, Zapcc would have been forced to share all their modifications to Clang with the whole world, and we would've all benefited from it -- and maybe the optimizations would even have been merged back into the mainline of Clang.

But as it stands now, this is a closed source product, that you to buy: https://www.zapcc.com/buy-zapcc/
The Great Depression was worldwide, not US specific. Cuba was affected by it, as were many countries. And while the tariffs definitely contributed to Cuba's problems during the Great Depression, it's a little unrealistic to think Cuba would be unaffected by the Great Depression.

This was 30 years before Fidel, before the embargo. The point was, you already had this anti-US sentiment in Cuba before Fidel came to power.

US Cuban trade did not end at that point. But when Fidel came to power (30 years later), he used that anti-US sentiment to nationalize all American property in Cuba. That is what actually ended US Cuban trade.
It looks wonderful! Just yesterday I did a quick workshop introducing neuroscience to scientific Python, in the Jupyter Notebook environment (very rough version here: https://github.com/stared/python-neuroaspects-2016, before updates). I will definitely sent the participants a link to your book.

But one small question: do you plan, by any chance, upload your notebooks to GitHub (or any other place, where one can easily see a rendered version; BTW one more selling point of Jupyter - the easiness to share)?
I don't understand, don't you obviously want both conditions? Isn't that a far better definition for minimalism?

Given objectives, constraints, and means, the most fit set of solutions are the "perfect" ones.
As I keep saying, we don't need to "inject capital". At this point, it's actually counterproductive. The problem isn't that there isn't enough capital to invest, but rather that there's too much capital. Supply-side economics only works when the system is starved for liquidity to start new business. Instead, we have companies and investors sitting on billions, trillions in liquidity, and no good place to put it. Adding more capital will not create growth or jobs. The cup runneth over already.

Moreover, you need to consider the risk/return/liquidity triangle. This is sort of Investing 101, but it's often lost on people making pronouncements about how we need to cut taxes - mostly people who don't have substantial real capital investment, who rely on wage-driven cash flow. There are three elements to any investment - risk, return, and liquidity. Risk is the likelihood that the investment might lose rather than gain. Return is the amount of growth over time. Liquidity - the forgotten factor - is how easily the investment can be divested and turned into something else. If you can give up substantial liquidity, you can get into much more lucrative investment.

Real estate is the classic low-liquidity example. Buying and selling real estate is slow and painful, and it ties up a lot of capital. But it should return well over time. But liquifying real estate against needs other than profit can be very, very costly.

Angel investing and venture capital are extreme examples. You wind up with capital completely locked, almost totally illiquid (hence "liquidity event"), at very high risk. But the rewards can be stupendous. And they should be.

At any rate, cutting taxes to pour more capital into a system that already has too much capital is dumb. It made sense 35 years, when the economy was cash-starved and at risk of runaway inflation. But decades later, all the growth concentrates at the top, the poor and middle class have stagnated for people's entire adult lives, and we're facing borderline revolutionary attitudes on both the right and the left. "Cutting taxes to stimulate investment" is putting us on the brink of both economic collapse and political radicalism, and given how it's worked, deservedly so.
Compulsive shopper banned from shopping online by her husband/therapist?
>Touchpad is a synonym for trackpad and has been forever.

I know, that's why I'm saying arguing about touchpad vs trackpad is stupid.
I always try to find good business books, but can rarely stomach them. I'm planning "The Snowball"[0] as my next try, but any recommendations for business books that are not "manifestly idiotic" would be welcome!
Every time I hear Thai language spoken I'm reminded that this tonal language inspired the creators of "Mars attacks" to what the fictional language used by the aliens should sound like, just because it sounded so alien.

I have to say though that the Thai language can be spoken relatively calmly and soothingly, but when spoken by in anger or in a particular kind of formality, it sounds quite similar to the language used in the movie. Doesn't matter if it's a male or female speaker, to a westerner it sounds like.. well, the crazy martians from Mars Attacks.

This is actually mentioned in the extras bits on the original Mars Attacks DVD from like 1998 or 1999 or so. They did use Thai language as the main inspiration for the language of the martians.
I find that reading fiction improves my overall desire and ability to read in general - thus improving my ability to take in technical content as well.
Was this properly disclosed? Has it been fixed?

I didn't see anything in the article about this but I may have just missed it.

But aside from that, this is a pretty big deal. MS Edge has been looking pretty good lately. It felt like they have been taking security more seriously, and the new AppGuard stuff looked interesting, but even that doesn't look like it would fix this as it looks like this is "working as intended" letting any link communicate outside the "web sandbox".

I was hoping Edge wouldn't go down the same path that IE did with "special" tie ins to the OS, but it seems they are still trying.
Oh, so maybe THAT is the reason why one of our customers had funny cases of thousands of his customers being double-billed on card payments by the payment processing provider!

As a developer (of the cash register software, which wasn't at fault in this case), I was kinda amused by the whole thing. But I can assure you, the higher-up business people weren't amused at all.
>> Perfection and correctness was written into every process.

you say that but the industries you mentioned have some of the worst code possible.
Yes, which was one of Fidel Castro's policies enacted in the 1976 constitution.
I would pick node simply because it is more mature. How good is the Postgres .NET Core package for example? Last I checked it was still being worked on (with good progress though).

For me it's not about .NET Core vs node but how good is it on the platform I use. I'm still not seeing any real evidence that people are using .NET on Linux with non SQL Serer databases for moderate trafficked sites. I need to see proof that the new .NET stuff is on par with the JVM or node for stability on other platforms than Windows. (been down the mono/xsp path before)
I don't read entire non-fiction books anymore but just search for it's summaries or notes.

Most non-fiction books revolve around a few central ideas. Once you internalize this you realize it isn't necessary to read the entire book. You just need to read the summary and notes that someone else has written.

For eg : I'm currently going through the book notes that Derek Sivers has written and just posted this last night : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13042438

Another source of (business book) summaries is Actionable Books Weekly : http://www.actionablebooks.com/en-ca/

Sometimes a good review on Amazon sufficiently maps the ideas in the book and is all that is required.

Further, you don't always have to buy the books. Your free local public libraries carry a lot of these books and even have the digital version that you can borrow.
or it may never have been built in the first place
This does not appear to violate the First Rule of Holes, and should, therefore, be acceptable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_holes
> Apple is renowned for their work in this area.

Apple is renowned for their draconian policies and, more importantly, massive marketing apparatus that brainwashes customers.

Their actual expertise in development, as exhibited in the last few years of buggy software and gimped hardware, are not that great.
yeah and what does that have to do with the article at all? not sure why she included it. imagine if a man said that stuff about a woman. i'd hear sexism and mansplaining nonstop.
Does anyone have any insight into what the motivation is for politicians to push this? Why are they so passionate about limiting people's privacy?

Surely you don't believe that this is about "fighting terrorism", right?
The country itself is poor, because of the blockade. If the US would let private companies trade with them and with the cubans freely, they wouldn't be poor.
> How does that even happen?

Fraud and abuse.

Treating Amazon like a mail-in library for books, tools, and other products is the easiest way.

Returning a huge number of your orders regardless of other forms of abuse.

Contesting valid CC charges.

Etc.

> I posit that someone who's banned from shopping at AMZN is more dangerous than someone who plays card games with a dark sense of humor.

I wouldn't necessarily say "dangerous". Maybe "untrustworthy" or "lacking in good judgement" or "lacking a strong moral compass".
Fair point. Unfortunately, in the US, the two are heavily linked.
Show HN: The FAT Band for FAT People
Well I don't want to be the one to say it but Perl is pretty much dead, it has been replaced by Python in the last 8years or so.
No and No. I want a hole, and a hole I will get.
Same in VA but the machine in no way indicates that it read it correctly.