skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gerrymandering is probably the single most important issue in our democracy.

It makes the House unrepresentative: democrats routinely win a higher percentage of the total vote cast for the House than their representation by number of seats (in 2014 republicans won 52% of the vote but controlled 57% of seats, couldn't find a number for this election season sadly). Effectively, democrats aren't democratically represented in the House.

It contributes to extremism: in 2014 only 16 of 247 republicans in the house won by less than 10 percentage points. In that scenario, the only real election is the primary, where you're competing against someone of your own party. Typically only the most committed (usually the least moderate) voters come out in primaries, so you're more likely to lose to someone more extreme than to someone more moderate. As a result we get people that are completely unwilling to compromise, and government grinds to a halt.

We can't have good government without two (or more, but never gonna happen in the US) reasonably functional parties that are willing to compromise to get stuff done. Partisan gerrymandering massively impedes that objective by reducing effective representation and increasing extremism.

This guy also seems to think it's pretty important: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/10/17/...
Your examples are all examples of history being written by the winners, which is the normal description of who writes history and which this article is a nice bit of contrarian argument against.

Probably it's more like history is written to support the view of the winners ( a party, social group, or culture), by the losers (individuals) within that view.

Or maybe it's a statistical spread with a certain percentage of history written by winners and others by losers.

Or maybe it is written by both winners and losers, and the writings of the ultimate winners are those that come down to us.
Thanks for the link. One question I'd pose to Nate is how multicollinear were the paper factor and the additional predictors? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicollinearity

Estimates can be unstable if multicollinearity is too high, say if only richer more educated districts use a certain type if voting machine.
All this talk of fake news and censorship increasingly makes me feel as though journalism is abdicating its responsibility to be a voice of dissent and skepticism by being entirely too cozy with corporate and government interests in exchange for access.

This quote has been attributed to many people over the years but I've always been fond of the saying:
News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.
I assume the quick easy solution to educating foreigners and then seeing them move home would be to award an unencumbered work visa on graduation?
Meh, I down voted him for over simplifying football.
He was the least wrong of the mainstream pundits and was under attack for suggesting that Trump was "one normal polling error" from winning.

Also, he actually did predict both the Cubs and Trump back on May 10th, albeit as a joke:

https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/730251094614528000
OwlchemyVR Mixed Reality Update 2
When I was a child I got a very bad grease burn. Fresh aloe cut right from the plant was applied it to the burn. Didn't seem to do anything.
Was that the case in previous elections? I.e. in 2012?
The exact same thing happens within China many years ago. China is decades ahead in information flow control.

Websites like Weibo/QQ/Wechat will display a banner text saying some tweets (or microblogging cards as you call it) contains a mis-information.

Any mis-information with more than five hundred retweets will face criminal prosecution.

The result? Authorities fight mis-information with half-baked and premature refutes. In practice refutes can be 100% arbitrary even fake. You can't refute a refute because they are final, non-debatable and in-reversible. Remember the refute mechanism is to stop the spread of "mis-information" so debate refutes are dangerous and would cause Streisand effect.

The best part, the process is 100% manual, so PR firms totally lobbied website admins, officials in power, this corrupted industry is multi-million dollar business today.

So who watches the watchmen? It's a twisted long path ahead.
I can't tell if you are being subtle or not. But, if those are the bigger problems, they are directly influenced by gerrymandering, no?
How global inequality changed and what we can expect for the future
Here is the definition of Fake news for you:

1. Any news that shows guns in good light.
2. Any news that might question global warming
3. Any news that might question Islam

... You get the idea. Prior to Trump's victory everything he said was racist, sexist, bigoted. All this supporters were labeled racists and fascists.

The fake news debate is nothing but putting first amendment at risk.
Corollary? Or cause?
I was wondering when we would finally see this, when I first saw the numbers a couple of weeks ago what I saw was pretty obvious evidence. I think I an election of this magnitude it makes sense to have everything thoroughly audited.
You can begin assessing the size of the effect with data like this list of % out of state students at public universities: http://www.collegexpress.com/lists/list/percentage-of-out-of...
Yes, you have to draw on some common knowledge outside information to know that the size of the effect is not large.

Footnotes aren't there to handhold us all the way from set theory axioms to sociological conclusions. There are a host of potential confounding effects that could be large but common sense tells us probably aren't for various reasons. This is one of those.
Is there a practical method to make the voting process transparent to audit yet able to maintain individual privacy?

Ideally the people should be able to audit the process.
Coup averted
Voting fraud doesn't seem to be actually happening. Voter suppression on the other hand does.
Ironically, as hard as it is for people to understand what those are, they are much simpler to produce than pencils.
I agree 100%. I mostly lean left on most issues but I am growing more and more unconformable with the tactics and the attitudes of lots of liberals.
On top of assembler being complicated, the CPUs contain another sort of compiler and optimizations, so it gets even harder to know what exactly happens.

I thought that moving is optional in a sense, and the compiler could decide to copy instead of move (?)
You should be using the Java 8 time APIs if you want to do it right.
>The Japanese already offered conditions of surrender, and we didn't accept it. Give me an example of another Nation State that has ever surrendered under the terms we imposed on Japan. Germany, Italy, no other country had this imposed on them.

This is simply false. We demanded UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER against all of the Axis powers, including Germany and Italy.

>Even if you were right about anything, that would not do anything to explain why murdering millions of innocent civilians by fire bombing and nuclear bombing urban civilian population centers was a good idea.

War is a horrible horrible thing. If there is ever another total war between major powers, that's what it would look like. In total war, the entire productive capacity of a nation is directed to the war effort. The distinction between military and civilian infrastructure becomes heavily blurred. E.g. typerwriter factories producing guns. Factories, farms, cities, all become valid targets. The combatants will do anything in service of victory. The "rules of war" are meaningless when world domination is in the cards. War isn't pretty, it's one of the most horrible things that can happen in this world.

And by the way, you are peddling historical revisionism. A settlement that involved Japan holding on to their empire was not an acceptable outcome of the war, and was most certainly not a surrender. See http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/52502 written by a Professor of History at Penn State.
One day I will comprehend how Nate Silver has managed to be, in one election cycle, vilified for both being TOO bullish on Trump's chances, and then just as equally vilified for not saying Trump would outright win.
Even though this is probably politically motivated, Trump supporters were calling for such things before the election, so most of them can't really complain.
Without California, Hillary loses the Popular vote as well. California 'single' handedly gave it to her. Some already think it was the Illegal-Alien vote that gave that to her in the first place.
Hmmm... a network aimed at Latinos in the USA favor the party opposed to the party that wants to deport them and calls them 'rapists'. Shocker.
When companies have wide-ranging impacts on real-world events (governments, economies, land use, etc) they tend to get regulated. I would be shocked if the large tech co's weren't subject to increased regulation 10y from now.
When will people realize that Change.org is absolutely and completely useless?
That's really not a good way to graph the data. If you're rigging an election (within a state) you win by total votes, not how many counties are won. Showing which counties tipped one way or the other by voting machine type is far more likely to reflect demographic factors.
It's a vicious cycle
Using a subset of c++ in a c fashion seems much saner than raw c without objects and having to use macros so much.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

I do wish that paywall articles could be tagged as such though.
It's the same way that Progressive Liberals call Obama a fascist, but Conservatives call him a socialist. It obviously can't be both, yet both sides strenuously believe it.
thats bizarre... it works fine for me... both locally and on the deployed site.

http://res.cloudinary.com/markdown2pdf/raw/upload/fl_attachm...

maybe its your browser... i'll do some more testing. thanks for the info!
At the risk of 100 down votes - considering the theory that "Clinton outperformed where paper ballots were used" - isn't there an alternate hypothesis that extra paper ballots could have been submitted by her supporters, as a lower-tech kind of fraud?

I get that this is a tech site, and we like to think that everything is the result of smart hackers (even the Trump election! because some Russian hacker could be the only explanation), but there are low tech options here as well.

The Project Veritas videos, whatever you may think of them, had high level operatives openly discussing tactics they use to affect elections. A few extra paper ballots seems like something a motivated person with access to a photocopier could accomplish.
So why is taxi a regulated industry?
Elixir Remote Meetup with Jose –  Today 23 at 1700 UTC
Between the World Series and the presidential election, I'd say he has been demoted to Nate Plastic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13018675
Yeah, I definitely agree that a popular reason for adoption was "go faster", which was poisonous to the actual attempt.

Honestly, I think you eventually can get substantial speed gains. But you mostly get them by cutting out waste. Doing that takes a fair bit of time and work. And not just work, but commitment to personal and cultural change. People don't do that under strong time pressure; instead they are inclined to revert to previous behavior.
Honestly, analysis of this type (breaking down vote patterns by machine/type and calling out the electronic vote winner) has been presented in previous elections and mainly treated as fringe conspiracy theory.

I think it is incredibly dangerous the way this type of talk (which does not look very credible if you believe Nate Silver's analysis) is now being mainstreamed by Democrats, the very people who in the days leading up to the election were setting their hair on fire over the possibility Trump might not respect the result.

I could not remotely imagine this type of thing being mainstreamed if it was Trump who had lost and whose supporters were claiming fraud with shoddy statistics.
Castle Clash Hack Tool No Survey (Android+iOS)
If people are this paranoid now, while this country is a democratic republic, then just imagine how bad it will get when they have it their way and all of the U.S becomes a Democracy. . .

http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/
there is a reasons as to why our founding fathers made this country a Democratic Republic rather than a Democracy. . .
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13018675
Hosting companies for one have a vested interest in this stuff. Looks like DO is hiring: https://www.digitalocean.com/company/careers/#technical-writ...
This is the #1 problem in tech hiring. Sadly folks in our industry help to perpetuate it, many devs think the same way as your HR person.
> it would be very unlikely for let's say a student who grew up in Georgia and studied at University of Michigan to stay in Michigan after graduation.

I would say it's not all that unlikely. There's professional and personal relationships (marriage, grad school, internships, etc.) that form over 4 years that can keep the person in state.
Get a Cable and Device Housekeeper: Smart Modular Charging Dock
That's not really the worst of both worlds though, it's a spacemacs issue that neither emacs or vim has.
To be clear, my point isn't that central planning is good. My point is that people may prefer centralized control for certain things even though they understand what non-directed processes can accomplish.

To use the author's example of the post office, there may be reasons why one might want the post office to be a public entity beyond "only government could build such a complex system". For instance, it might be reasonable to wonder whether a postal system that evolved organically would cover everyone in a society, or would rural people or others who are expensive to reach be left out. Mail delivery probably qualifies as something we want everyone to have access to in order for a lot of our systems to function.
In the past when I used to support webhooks what I did was very simple:

* Receive the HTTP POST submission to my hook end-point.

* Save this data in a queue.

* Return to the hook-caller "200 OK - $ID".

This was better than trying to initiate a long-running job as a result of the hook, and meant that I could trigger "fake webhooks" just by adding data to the queue manually.

I'm sure there are other approaches, but this is a flexible one that also gave the benefit of being simple. (For the queue I just used Redis.)
> Also, one of the core agile ideas in my world is that there are no deadlines or release dates for specific features.

100% agreed. This is one of those things that so many companies can't even conceive of. But once you get people converted, it works so much better.
/r/conspiratard
What are some sources for voter ID laws suppressing the minority vote? I've always bought this at face value until recently.

A cursory Google search worries me even more, since all it seems to bring forward is a load of rote media content, which really pings my propaganda radar.
I think that's the fundamental problem with translating; different languages have different information encoded in a sentence.

For instance, as you've said, Japanese encodes the relation to whom you're speaking. Even French does this (to a lesser extent), with "tu"/"vous" depending on how familiar the person you're speaking to is.
Check the BBC Micro User Guide [1] for a very quick example of why so many of us that got computers at that time got into programming. By page 5 you're writing code (after the info on how to plug it in). Lines, colours, and sounds by pages 6 and 7. Page 168 is program optimisation techniques. Page 428: "An introduction to assembly language" ... 6502 assembler, amazing. That guide inspired me (aged 10) to start writing games, and gave me a career!

[1] http://bbc.nvg.org/doc/BBCUserGuide-1.00.pdf
You can think that this is bad to expell people that way from social interactions with others. That it is bad for a minority to decide the news a majority should have easy access to.

And therefore, you could decide as a society that you want to forbid Facebook to do that.

It assumes you are in a democracy. China obviously is not. But if you're lucky to live in one, then you don't have to accept what Facebook does, at least in your country, because they are a private company.
There's a big difference between breaking compatability with a $39 mouse vs a $1600 monitor that you could have bought a few months ago.
This is clearly bad faith flamebait. Downvoted and flagged.
Twitter Bans Own CEO Jack Dorsey from Twitter
We live in a post-democracy world, the people should choose whatever the elites tell them to, or the outcome gets changed if it's the not the right answer (Brexit, Austria, Trump, Le Pen?).
>If you were handed a piece of paper with a high level description of how the universe truly works, would you recognize it as the truth or dismiss it as the ramblings of a lunatic?

Using false equivalence to convince people that your religious beliefs are correct is unscrupulous to say the least. Your arguments do not prove your claims. It would be better to simply claim up front that it takes a certain amount of faith...then proceed with your story.
> If you don't like the deal, Facebook is not a right, and you can choose to not use Facebook or not, depending on your morals.

No one in their right mind thinks Facebook policy's are their rights. Facebook can openly start censoring news if it wants to. I view Breitbart as a publication that actively censors leftist news and NYT as publication that censors libertarian news. They are both good businesses but albeit far tinier than Facebook.

The moment facebook starts "dealing with fake news" I am going sell off my FB shares. Just like I sold my twitter shares long back once they banned account of my favourite blogger for criticizing Islam.
What do you mean exaggerating for comedic affect? What kind of horrible person would do that?
As a prior, I would consider submitting lots of extra paper ballots to be much weaker than manipulating electronic voting. (To be clear, I think the prior on both is fairly weak.)

Project Veritas is not a credible source.

Edit: It seems like HN has gotten a lot more Trump and conservative since the election. I should hope that reiterating that submitting thousands of paper ballots of a lot more complicated than hacking into a computer system is obvious.
The fact that a statistician suggests an audit leads one to believe there is some evidence or statistical insight here. However there doesn't seem to be any evidence base, rather a good old "let's just check just in case some bad guys did something bad!"

I will say it again, "hackers" are the boogie man and worse yet state actors offer any political group an easy way out of having to offer any evidence to cast doubt or dispersion against anything counter to their worldview or agenda.
What's wrong with normal paper ballots?
I have three recommendations:

Think Python: http://greenteapress.com/wp/think-python-2e/

Polya's How to Solve It: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It

Udacity's Design of Computer Programs: https://www.udacity.com/course/design-of-computer-programs--...
Why is a Hispanic lady selling her home made dish is subject to regulation and jail term ?
Is it sophistry?

What is the definition of censorship?

>Censorship is the suppression of free speech, public communication or other information which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions.

How does this not fit under said definition? Whether or not the act is done by a "public" or a "private" entity is irrelevant to the definition.
Some accounts aren't really important, and then I don't care if they e-mail me my password or if I reuse passwords.
"lost my database somehow"

I have mine in Dropbox and at least 3 devices. I'm really not concerned I'll lose it.
Or there could simply be another variable.

For example, maybe rural counties are more likely to use paper ballots than urban counties. (Or any other variable: income, race, geography.)
If they're paying below market wages then the current employees might not be the most efficient bunch in the first place.
TL;DR - Two good ways to measure if you're making something people love:
1. Your users actively tell their friends about your product.
2. NPS surveys.

In the beginning it seems like the best way to measure if people are telling their friends is by not measuring at all. Just talk to users. You'll find out if people are about to tell their friends or how new users found you (an existing user sent them your way).

I'm always weary of surveys since they can be a dangerous mix of qualitative and quantitative. NPS seems solid since there's no denying a number. Sometimes I see NPS surveys that only ask for the rating (1-10) and don't ask a follow-up question ("Why did you choose 5?"). This is such a missed opportunity since the "why?" text can contain feedback gold. There's also no substitute for following up after the NPS survey to do more in-depth qualitative feedback gathering through user interviews.

I'm curious to hear more about what Sam thinks about measuring DAU/WAU/etc in the beginning.
There is a language switcher in the footer no login required.
Ruby 2.4 introduces liberal_parsing option for parsing bad CSV data
It's a graph which explains why people are curious, not why the data looks that way, so it's fine.

If you're rigging an election, you're going to rig electronic machines because it's easier than changing thousands of paper ballots. Therefore in a rigged election with a mix of paper and electronic voting, you would expect the electronic voting to favour the rigged candidate. Of course, on summary numbers this is indistinguishable from perfectly normal activity.
Well, I was also talking about various other things, but you're right.

So it's not only the worst of both worlds, it also has problems unto itself.
Easy as printing $100 bills.
It would be great to finally get back the true programmable animations that we had with Flash so many years ago. It took a while, but things to be coming full circle--for the better.
> mass net exodus of people is pretty silly

Well not necessarily "mass" (pun intended?) but -2% from 2000 to 2015. Note that everyone who moved from other cities in Massachusetts to Boston (and Boston burbs) are considered neutral by this metric. And there's always bound to be graduates of those Boston universities headed for the other coast. Also note that things are very different in Boston and elsewhere in 2016 from how they were in 2000.
> The problems that I see most junior devs struggling with are at a much higher level. How do you organize large scale programs? How do you make sure that different parts interact flawlessly? A book about design patterns could help here, but without experience you won't appreciate what the patterns are good for.

I couldn't disagree more. Algorithms are the base level that you build on. Anything non-trivial you will have to understand what is available to you and create something new. Take something common, doing a substring match on a list of items. If you don't have algorithms knowledge I'd bet your solution is going to adversely affect the final program.

Good choices of data structures, and solid understanding of algorithms are the units of composition in creating software. IMO

> But by far the most difficult part to wrap your head around is concurrency. How do you make sure your assumptions all hold up when multiple threads / processes / users are all doing stuff in parallel? That's really hard to understand, and you need a combination of theory and experience to master this.

Or use Rust and have the compiler check it for you, so you don't have to be a wizard.
I use 1Password for time-based one time passwords. They're very upfront about the limitations, and I'm comfortable with the tradeoff, especially since it has eliminated the hassle of setting up Google Authenticator repeatedly.

https://blog.agilebits.com/2015/01/26/totp-for-1password-use...