skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These are the certified electronic voting machines (DREs) for Pennsylvania:

http://www.dos.pa.gov/VotingElections/OtherServicesEvents/Pa...

The Android device in use is the EA Tablet. The certification tests are listed in "EA TABLET FOR ANDROID WITH JELLYBEAN 4.2.1 ELECTRONIC Test Report," dating from 2013.

To be fair, it's probably the best of the horrible lot in security, but that ain't saying much.

For example, the iVotronic systems contain a readily accessible compact flash card right on the top, which stores the election returns. Demonstration machines are set up in each county, so I went to see one in person. Unsurprisingly, the demo machine's card wasn't even covered with a tamper-evident seal.

The devices, including the compact flash cards and the PEBs, are reused from year to year because the legally required certification for the device is very narrow. As the demo machine compact flash cards and PEBs are re-used in each election, at any time prior to the election, infecting the demo machine can be used as a vector to attack the entire county voting total.

Since the demo machine is not sealed, its compact flash can be accessed. If the compact flash card is compromised, the system can be quickly owned. From there, the malware can spread rather trivially to the PEB unit used as a secure token by the election workers, and from there to the county's Unity system at Election Central, allowing the entire county's vote to be altered. So instead of the 4,500 machine compromises PA is claiming would be necessary to influence a state election, it would probably only take 6-7 people any time in the past ten years planting their malware in a few key counties.

All one would need to do to untraceably change the vote totals would be walk in to the county election commission, swap the compact flash out for your malware, and leave. If you do this at any point prior to the election, the malware can spread from the demo machine, to a live voting machine, and finally, when the compact flash cards are entered into the Unity system for final tally, the malware can compromise the whole lot. Then the malware would self-delete, leaving no reliable paper audit record.

Interestingly, from a legal perspective, the Secretary of the Commonwealth's certification for these machines is contingent upon the locking mechanism preventing access to the compact flash card. The machine that I saw, the most common model in use in the state, physically could not be secured that way. The plastic cover mechanism to which the lock is affixed simply doesn't cover the flash card slot well enough.

Under the PA election code, if a specific requirement of the Secretary's certification is not met, the law would invalidate the votes cast through all the iVotronics as a matter of law. As the machines were not configured as approved, they aren't approved for casting ballots, which would throw the PA recount into chaos. It's probably the only judicial avenue left to sue for a state-wide recount that might actually have a chance of being considered.

Nobody tell Jill Stein. In all liklihood, the PA legislature would just send the current electors anyway, as is their prerogative.
The options are:

- cash and or jewelry in a safety deposit box (will lose money every year due to inflation!)
- bitcoin or some kind of untraceable digital currency (risky!)
- buy hard assets over time that don't depreciate in value (fine art, collectible coins, etc.)
- transfer assets to someone you really trust
- life insurance policy that you pay into over time

Back in the day you could have bought bearer bonds and stash them away in a safety deposit box.
We detached this flagged subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13070490.
PCIe is really the only option; the question is just whether it's in one box or cabled.
The biggest show stopper for me is the lack of block storage, while both DO and Vultr have it.
It would be even more well if all the porcupines that are so proud of their prickly needles would grow into pretty badgers.
if anyone form google cloud reading this, are there any plans for adding postgres support on GC SQL?
Great presentation by Matt Wood. I've been working with him for years (until 2014) and I think he's a great presenter (among other things).
Show HN: Anybar indicators with physical LED strips
That's just anecdotal. No one has seen it. The Wired article sounded like content marketing.
Anyone interested psychedelic users' perspectives on harm reduction, health benefits, and risks should check out http://erowid.org and http://bluelight.org (especially the Psychedelic Drug Discussion subforum).
Uhh considering how divorce rates are near 50%, your assumption of divorces occurring amicably as a second-most common case would heavily depend on what portion of that 40-50% _does_ actually end in a friendly manner.

Let's be extremely optimistic and say 80% of divorces occur amicably.. that would give us ~10% odds of a nasty divorce--which I would not chalk up to "outliers"
Ask HN: SW Consultants/Contractors, how do you isolate client data?
I've been doing software consulting/contracting for a while now and one of the biggest challenges I have faced is figuring out how to best isolate client data, particularly ensuring that I don't accidentally display/leave behind source code/databases/etc from one client at the site of another. It's possible that I'm overly paranoid about this, but it's something that I feel is important, so I'm looking for tips from others who deal with the same issues.

So far my approach has been to run two different laptops and a VM, but juggling the IT overhead is getting tiresome, and VMs have certain drawbacks as well (e.g. some client products are too demanding for VMs). Switching between client tasks is also a pain as I have to maintain two workspaces at my home office, and one isn't as nice as the other.

I've considered external drives (all of my drives are encrypted), but that's cumbersome as well, and doesn't protect against things that cannot be installed on the external drives, nor swap files, temp files, etc.

So... has anybody come up with a system that works for them? My dream would be for my laptops to all have easily swapped drive bays, but that's not currently an option, and doesn't solve the IT overhead issue -- backups are a pain as it is! Multi-boot would be similar, but requires larger drives, increases the risk of losing everything at once, still has the same IT burden, and doesn't always go smoothly. (and is a pain with UEFI!)

So, I ask you HN: What are your best tips for juggling multiple clients' installations?
>make the choice of president up to the electors

which maybe they should have.

>representatives has been capped

which should be fixed.
> Firstly, people aren't rational

That's why I said mostly rational. Out of the thousands of little decisions and behaviors we engage with in a given day, most are rationally chosen to move us towards our goal. Most are basically habit, of course, not some long, drawn-out process. But, still rational.

> There's no correllation between these attributes.

Oh, I'm not arguing that current drug policy is great and sensible. I think it should be liberalized. I just don't think a total free-for-all is a great idea either. Ideally we'd set the status of a drug -- recreationally legal vs medicinally legal vs decriminalized vs illegal -- based on its societal harm, rather than whatever ad hoc method we use right now.
Support isn't the best. I was attempting to restore a very large database and they shut down my instance for using excessive disk and CPU. I didn't get any response of what sort of limits to stick under.

Otherwise they are very similar to DO but with more data centres. The only complaint otherwise is their instances start a little slower. The API is very easy to use though.
I am on a tablet on Android 4.4.4, with the latest Netflix version downloaded 4.12.0 (code 13287), trying to download Narcos, and don't see the download icon as shown on Netflix's instructions[0]. Anyone else not seeing it?

[0]: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/54816
Watch this for an interesting perspective on Divorce in Canada:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaC-2lj6HNg
HA! No, it rarely works like this, especially if one party is more spiteful than the other, or if there are kids. Pre-nups are the best way to go.
Stop making excuses for adults to engage in infantile behavior. I was perfectly capable of making life decisions at age 18 - 19. And I am not a special genius.
Justice is whatever the 'justice' systems says it is. Citizens have no recourse. The 'justice' system has no checks or balances that can be accessed, except by the rich. There are no penalties for abuse or misuse, even when uncovered.

Yeah, that's exactly what I think of when I think of the concept of 'justice'. One day some people might create a just society, but it almost certainly won't be in the US.
Thanks a lot for the reply. I totally understand the resources argument, especially as I'm probably one of the people who'd come looking to support forums because I bricked my device.

I'm super excited about the idea of a hackable e-paper device and look forward to seeing what happens. Congratulations on the launch, it's a great looking device.
I need the inverse of this is anyone selling that?
> In this experiment

What hypothesis is this experiment testing? Are there controls?
Seems like these chat bots have A LOT of lock in. So the question is which one to pick? This one? IBM Watson? Others? Which horse are you betting on and why?

Amazon making this is great because it's developer friendly and will surely fall in price and improve in quality over time. They also have to make it work well because it's a critical ordering channel for them going forward.

Seems like IBM has been focused on this for years though? Worried they will try to make this a profit center though... rather than continually dropping the price.

Other companies working on this I should be aware of?

Thoughts?
"Taken to the cleaners":

Child support for 2 kids and 1/2 the house. Oh come on! You have to take care of your kids! And, like it or not, 1/2 that house is yours and you should help pay. Sell it if you need to get out from under the debt, but it's still 1/2 yours to deal with.

Alimony. Ok, maybe he could have gotten out of this.

All in all, this is HARDLY getting taken to the cleaners. This is pretty much to be expected (especially the Child Support!).
I've a bunch of LED flashlights, powered by 18650 cells. I've one charger, and one extra 18650 cell; the unused cell is always sitting in the charger; when I need a fresh battery in any flashlight, I just swap cells.

The flashlights are cheap stuff from China, $10 or thereabouts. The cells are about half that price. The charger is about same price as a flashlight.

The damn things are blindingly bright. The whole family has a 18650 flashlight on their bikes, and I always get comments from people when I'm biking through the neighborhood. Oh, and the devices are tiny, the barrel is just big enough to contain the Lithium cell.

In terms of amount of light, I'm not even sure I want something better. Seriously, they beat the pants off the antiquated Maglite candles in every way.

The current regulator inside is not resistive, it's a switched regulator with a frequency in the audible range. If it's very quiet in the room and you press the barrel to your cheekbone, you can hear a very faint whine from the regulator.
For any cryptocurrency that's profitably mineable on AWS the difficulty immediately increases to the point that it's no longer profitable.
It's also in the US, Germany, Hong Kong and Singapore: https://www.leaseweb.com/platform/data-centers
That's ridiculous, regardless of your username.
Is that what I have? A security-first mindset? Honestly it never even crossed my mind back in 2010 when I bought a Nexus S that the thing to do was put the keys to the kingdom on something that might fall out of a pocket somewhere... silly me; I just made a separate account and I don't use that account for signing up other accounts or whatnot; when that account gets compromised they'll find precious little of value.
"Ended up in the rhubarb" or similar variation seems like the most appropriate snowmobile slang.
Very expensive. The 40$/mo plan on Linode, gives and you 4 cores and 8GB ram.
Note that the transfer pricing strategy only makes sense for this fellow because he's not a US citizen/resident. If he were, it would be illegal to not report the income of the (wildly-profitable) off-shore entity. And if you have to report the income on both sides, there's no point playing transfer pricing games.

But due to his foreign residency and citizenship, he only has to report the US-based income to the IRS, and the transfer pricing shenanigans are "legal" but subject to repricing by the IRS.
I'd be interested in practical use cases that come to your mind (like someone who commented about genomics data processing for a university).

What could YOU use this for professionally?

(I certainly always wanted to play around with an FPGA for fun...)
A relationship that's based on things other than money is unromantic?

Is "you get half my assets" really the height of romance?
Probably more questions along the line of "What excites you? What does your ideal job look like?"

Which, earlier in my carer, I "flunked" several times, and rightly so -- because indeed, I actually wasn't particularly interested in working for the companies I was interviewing with (I was just fatigued at the process in general, looking for a "placeholder" job, basically).
> My bookshelves and whatnot don't either.

Speak for yourself :)

I agree, though; I use a lot more lights around the house, but they're small and very directed for their purpose. Many of them are controlled by cheap, ubiquitous PIR modules so that they're only on when needed, with absurdly low quiescent current. I use less light overall because it's only where I need it to be, and I find this to be much nicer on my eyes, and generally pleasing for the evening. The added efficiency is just a bonus on top of all that. Many are undervolted, as well, so should last a very long time; the main concern is the lifespan and quality of the power supplies.
In terms of dose-reponse, 100 micrograms of LSD produces effects roughly as strong as 20 milligrams of psilocybin.

In terms of subjective perception of the immersion or "pushiness" of the experience, I expect almost all users experienced with both compounds would rate LSD as stronger.
Quick feedback for the AWS team:

* First, this is great. The simplified interface vs EC2 is terrific. This is the direction EC2 (and RDS and S3 and basically everything) needs to be going.

* Instances you start in LightSail don't show up in your EC2 console. I would expect there to be some kind of data sharing there.

* Similarly, creating a "static IP address" doesn't show up in your elastic IP list. I'm not sure if this is intentional, but to manage two different views of products that you're billing me for is... troublesome.

* Last, if I could migrate elastic IPs from EC2 to LightSail I'd be migrating all of my instances immediately. The bandwidth savings are massive. (Related: when is the 2TB limit for a t2.small going to be migrated over to EC2?)
Conclusions at writing library to checking email in Go, Rust, Dart, and Swift
This seems to be a code dump from the comma AI startup. It also indicates their autonomous driving platform runs on a "stripped version" of Android.

Which seems to indicate that they are clinically insane, given they are using a system that can easily have excessive scheduling latencies under load to steer a car.
I don't really understand why someone would not just stay with $200M without hassles, instead of hiding $400M. The value of money is logarithmic. What can be bought with $400M that cannot be bought with $200M??

If it were a case of wife wanting 99% of his assets, it would be reasonable to fight. If I lived some of these FoaF stories where the husband is wiped out, then I'd rather go to jail (and profit from an MRA blog some years later)
don't forget the Canadian's .eh

(I know it's .ca but come on)
DynamoDB is like $5 or $10 bucks a month? but I understand the need to keep it to a minimum.

Athena is really interesting and if it can be as it is advertised "Serverless SQL" then they've got a killer product in the pipes: A future where developers no longer need to spend time on scaling, configuring, maintaining, strategizing deployments but upload code and instantly begin reaping the benefits of serverless tech.

The only missing component that would be a killer feature is something that answers to Azure's Active Directory. It would be nice if we had serverless plug-and-play user authentication and access control that integrated with Lambda and Athena.

I'd imagine some sort of "RoR on Serverless" type of framework that will scaffold out CRUD, User Management & REST Api is going to be in the works as well.

The only potential downside I see at the moment for Serverless is the uncertainty surrounding cold boots, it will directly affect user experience. It's fine when you got enough traffic to keep things in the "warm" state but there needs to be no dead zone when the call to the API Gateway is taking many seconds waiting for Lambda function to fire.
https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/device-famil...
It is impossible to build anonymity system without some sort of centralization due to possibility of Sybil attack. You need some trusted entity beforehand, otherwise your ISP can just simulate the whole network for you and never let you connect to the real network without you even noticing this.
I think you may be confusing profit and revenue. Amazon's revenue is higher than Google's.
>and will have to start over in my only known career (software development) that is brutally ageist.

freelance consulting pays better and nobody gives a rats ass what you look like.
>Alphabet is the only official way to type out pronunciation of mainland Chinese, so trying to avoid the alphabet for Chinese is basically impossible.

Chinese schoolchildren learn Pinyin before they learn Hanzi. Romanisation is only a problem if you're under the false assumption that these letters mean what you think they mean. It isn't hard to internalise the idea that j, x and q represent completely alien sounds that you must learn to recognise and reproduce.
Does Google have a $5-10/month "normal" offering (ie, a plain ole server)?
Wow, I never thought to look up etymology of the word in English. Thanks!
I agree completely.

I feel like the best thing to do in regards to drug legalization is to try to empirically link each class/type of drug to various societal outputs, like productivity, price of medical care, etc, and then tax the drugs accordingly.

Meth decrease general productivity by 100%? Tax it at a higher rate. Cocaine/MDMA/LSD have benefits and fewer side affects? Tax them at lower rates.
Seems as though you could use a tracing jit approach to offload hot loops to an FPGA very generically. Though it'd have to be a really long-running loop to outweigh the substantial overhead in synthesizing the logic gates.
...and then deletes the file.

-> or just get angry when they reboot and cant get back in without unplugging it from whatever remote location it was plugged into and taking it home to plug into a keyboard mouse and monitor.

great for the effort. i did baulk when i first started a pi to find the defaults were so insecure. But I'm not sure the solutions are that helpful. cant we just set a root password on first boot like every other nix distro.
An Australian energy tech startup has won over the Japanese
Seems like pretty sound logic.

Though to answer the second question: there are plenty of cases (usually hardware) where people really underestimate how much things cost to make. I've lost count of the number of stories where startups said "We messed up our mold/printer/fab order which cost us $20k to redo, and then we had no money to make t-shirts".
Well for me, development in cli. I do nothing that requires 16+Gig of ram. 8 is plenty for me (what i have in my macbook pro, iirc).

Sure, ram is always nice, but i am able to do my work and take my laptop (which i also code for fun on) wherever i am. Hotels/couch/offices/etc.

I'm not stuck to a single spot, in a single room, in a single building. It's a really, really important feature to me. Even just at my house i move around the house frequently.
This seems comparable to Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-service...
> I don't think there is a dominant culture in the US.

I think that's a stretch. You will note that most of the country, from business to government to IT, is run by people of the same skin color, socio-economic class, and gender. Those people also fill higher education (sans the gender) the stepping stone to opportunity too. Look at photos of the US Senate, Fortune 500 CEOs, etc.

That doesn't make them the same 'culture', however the word and its groupings are defined (it's always nebulous), but clearly there are cultures that are largely excluded.
> Understanding how git works internally "from the ground up" has been incredibly helpful in my everyday work;

I'm a very competent git user and don't know how blobs work (nor care). I haven't hit a problem scenario so far in which I had to dissect a blob.

> I feel like the same thing could apply to PGP/GnuPG.

If you don't know crypto, the internals of GNUPG are a bad way to learn it.

I would recommend reading a book, such as Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier.

Someone who reads that should be a much better informed, much more sophisticated user of crypto, whether it be an application like GNUPG or a some cryptographic programming library or communication protocol. A developer who reads that book should have the know-how to implement some crypto and spot some crypto-related security flaws.

How GNUPG stores things in various formats is less important than the semantics of those things: like what is a private key, what is a signature and so on. You need to understand what is happening when you, say, verify a signature; just not necessarily at the bit level.
You're sorely wrong. Divorces in several states, California included, are like mutually assured destruction with one side having twice the firepower, and everything about a relationship can change in a divorce.

To OP: you don't have to hide your assets in offshore accounts, you can talk to an estate planner and look into setting up a trust (google domestic asset protection trust) and make yourself the sole beneficiary. You would no longer "own" the money and it's protected in a divorce.

Also prenups are typically worthless in the madness that is family court. Never ever ever rely on one.
I argue that the reason it's used outside browsers is primarily that a generation of programmers learned it first - IN a browser.

As a language, it has more warts and less features than many other languages, but it also is unimposing and does not get in your way.

It could have been much better though.
I have Philips Wake-up light and I hate it: radio is terrible, no week scheduling, light volume knob broke after year or so, it can powerup itself with radio in the middle of day or night for no reason, it does not keep time accurately (for such huge price), and so on. But clock display is orange and dim (with 3 level of dimness), so I use it as night clock only — it really good for that.
From the FAQ

"Q: How does Aurora improve recovery time after a database crash?

Unlike other databases, after a database crash Amazon Aurora does not need to replay the redo log from the last database checkpoint (typically 5 minutes) and confirm that all changes have been applied, before making the database available for operations. This reduces database restart times to less than 60 seconds in most cases. Amazon Aurora moves the buffer cache out of the database process and makes it available immediately at restart time. This prevents you from having to throttle access until the cache is repopulated to avoid brownouts."

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/faqs/