skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, many things are decided by elected comitees, but referendum are required to change the constitution (we're ok with it changing, it's not seen as an untouchable artifact here).

Citizens can also decide to submit things to referendum, and that has absolute decision power. To do so you need to gather a set number of signatures depending on the level of the decision (communal, state-wide or federal). This is very often used by political parties as a "weapon" to counter their opponent's decisions - they organise signature gatherings, and if they reach their goal the people gets to have the final word on the topic at hand.

Of course, anyone can submit a referendum on anything, as long as you gather the required number of signatures. You don't need to be elected or in a party or anything like that.

The system does lead to some ridiculous things being put up for nation-wide discussion, but that is usually seen as the cost of living in a direct democracy. I can think it's stupid, but it's your right to bring it to my attention if you consider it important (a bit like freedom of speech and the old "I'll fight your your right to say it even though I disagree").

EDIT: doh' I did repeat the "referenda" mistake here :/ Edited out.
How do we know what was the temperature 1000 or 3000 years ago?
Real Soon Now
You have quite a cynical view. In Switzerland, people usually elect a group of people at the same time to a cantonal executive (i.e. a group of ministers from different parties who have too choose the president among themselves). If one of them refuses to step down in case of a clear fraud, the others will force him/her to do so because it is in their interest of being seen as legimately elected. Also, it is unlikely that they conspire as they stem from different parties. Even the national government consists of ministers from four different parties.
As an autodidact I will only note that you can learn at pace (given intelligence and aptitude) only so long as you give it 110%. That extra 10% wears on you. Eventually you will not be able to keep up. The old saying is 'learn from others mistakes'; being self taught leaves you open to not understanding others mistakes and learning a lot from your own. Time++.
Show HN: Ballotter, an Online Video Debating Platform for Our Discussions
We have created Ballotter as an online (live/recorded) video debating platform to bring the discussions worth sharing on an online stage.

Ballotter has just came online and is at the beta stage.

We hope to gather a collection of amazing debates and people who want their voice heard with spectators voting and sharing.

Couple of questions for HN:

- What is your take on Ballotter?
- Any suggestions on the product?
- Any suggestions on user gathering?
I am perhaps about to make an ass of myself, but i have the impression that ö and ø can be interchanged in a pinch.
If they're referring to the typical classification of autonomous vehicles, Level 5 is complete autonomy. Level 3 refers to human intervention required for everything but highway driving in good conditions. Of course, they may be referring to the third generation of vehicles made by Uber, which is a relatively useless term as each manufacturer will require a different number of generations before reaching full autonomy. Not really sure as it's entirely possible this is both third generation and level 3 autonomy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car
Interesting in the Chinese way :-(
If the government shuts down due to the lack of funding, they will likely get broken up.
That's an interesting concern that I hadn't considered if I'm understanding you correctly. I'm imagining you could have a situation where a downstream process change helps mitigate the effect of the upstream defect. In that situation your measure of what constitutes good and bad parts will need to change in the ML model.

I think I'm somewhat lucky in that with my product downstream processes are unlikely to change in a significant enough way to warrant "retraining" the model, but I guess that's probably the only way to handle that - retrain in the event of a significant process change. Our product stays fairly stable once it releases to production and the nature of the downstream processes is that they would have very little effect on the perceived severity of the defect at the final electrical test.
Taking Requests: TalkNotes, Cliff's Notes for Tech Talks
Call of Duty is a well-established franchise.

Oculus was brand new, and as one of their first acts they pissed off most of the people who had supported them, and the VR community in general.

With a perfectly good alternative (that is in some ways better), why would any enthusiast choose Oculus at this point?

And non-enthusiasts aren't buying the systems because they're too expensive and there are too few games. They effectively handed their entire market to another company for the next few years.
Would you though? I could easily see a card with a crypto accelerator that only has a public key to encrypt one-off random AES keys for each photo/video/file. You set it up at home, leave the private key there, go do your filming/photographing. Now no one can decrypt your files except you after you get home download your encrypted files and run them through some trivial decryption program.
I don't see a Zuck. What gives?
Note that it's the announcement that's "ahead of the meeting," not the actual hiring.
Intelligence agencies want as many possible vectors for attack as possible. Especially unknown ones that you are not prepared for them to exploit. Everyone is assuming they wouldn't bother with a client backdoor... That right there is enough reason for them to get a client backdoor!
Once you see the "man behind the curtain," game AI loses some of its magic. I'm sure a lot of those devs wanted to make something really sophisticated, but like you said there's a balance between function and performance and for the majority of players the faked version works just as well.

I made a euchre game several years ago and put in an AI as basic as you mention for Civ: all it did was pick a random card from its hand that followed suit. If they were placing the first card, it was all random. I got praise from people at how the AI surprised them with feints etc to beat them when they thought they were going to get points. Some I told, others I let believe the magic :)
Neither do the representatives, honestly. They are elected to two-year terms so they spend half their time in office campaigning, and there are no particular qualifications or expertise required to run.
IBM employed roughly 378,000 people in 2015[1] and the actual number laid-off is closer to 14,000[2]. This represents 3.7% of the workforce. While layoffs are never great, most of these were from legacy systems as they have been attempting to hire 25,000 since that was announced[3].

IBM is a very large company and employs a great number of people. They have been transitioning from a hardware company to a services company and thus, many workers who specialized only in the older tech will be let go. I cannot speak for everyone, but (AFAIK) they were given opportunity to move elsewhere in the company.

To put the layoffs in context, Cisco is expected to lay off 14,000 workers (nearly 20% of its workforce), Walmart is laying off 17,500, and Seagate is laying off 8,100 by 2017 - 15.5% of its 2015 workforce[4].

1: http://www.ibm.com/investor/att/pdf/IBM_Annual_Report_2015.p...

2: http://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-layoffs-continue-1463784692

3: http://fortune.com/2016/05/20/ibm-layoff-employees-may/

4: http://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/08/19/12-companies-...
Usually I can see why titles are edited. This one makes no sense to me. After reading the article I can certainly see why he was important, but a household name he ain't.
AGI isn't a replacement doomsday scenario; it's a set of additional scenarios to be considered together with the usual ones - nuclear war, biological war, global pandemic, gamma ray bursts, etc.
What did that first teacher do so wrong?
How is this going to combat people who make a mess inside the vehicle after going 100 percent without human drivers/test engineers? If it picks up a drunk person at 3 AM who then throws up inside the car, is it vomit-aware and knows it needs a cleaning before picking up the next passenger?
If you have reading comprehension problems, sure, that's what he said.
I think Section 2 – Business Practices and AI is particularly relevant and is something I've thought about a lot.

> Engineers and design teams are neither socialized nor empowered to raise ethical concerns regarding their designs, or design specifications, within their organizations. Considering the widespread use of AI/AS and the unique ethical questions it raises, these need to be identified and addressed from their inception.

Has anyone got stories of trying to raise ethical concerns within their organisation? Were you listened to? Were you happy with the results or left frustrated?
Given Trump's propensity to publicly denounce individual organisations, including threats of withdrawing government business, it's hardly surprising that companies are now lining up to court Trump's favour in the same vein as Carrier. The only thing that does surprise is just how quickly companies are adapting to the new game and lining up to present King Trump some kind of offering.

The most recent Economist cover story provides some interesting perspective on this http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21711314-president-ele...
You know, my takeaway from that graphic is that higher temperatures appear to be pretty well-correlated with improved human quality of life.

And of course the graphic doesn't show a cost-benefit analysis for any of its three future scenarios. Would it be worth a nickel to preserve the current environment exactly as it is? Maybe (although maybe some change would be good; I don't know). Would it be worth $1 quadrillion a day to prevent a single town of 1,000 people from being submerged by rising oceans? Almost certainly not.

What are the costs of each scenario, and what are the benefits? Is it worth losing a few houses in Miami if it means that Oslo produces more food?

That the world has always been changing has always been true, whether respecting climate or any number of other factors. That we're affected by change has also always been true. That we can have an effect on it is relatively new, and that we ought to is unproven. Frankly, the 20th century makes me very suspicious of any technocratic solution which claims to be able to predict every possibility and make the best choice (remember the Aswan Dam!). That doesn't mean we should do nothing, either (doing nothing is itself a choice which needs to be justified too!), but it means we should be very suspicious of easy answers which claim to be all benefit and no cost.
Maybe, but I think the cameras are already working at full tilt just to encode the file. Also I don't think you can run ML on anything professional, and Canon's consumer range are increasingly poor value for video.
Exactly. And where is Trumps plan to meet with organizations that represent the interests of the American tech worker?

All these executives see is the bottom line, and to them it looks like a bunch of overpaid nerds and there is a nice solution to that problem and all they have to do is repeat over and over "we can't find the skills we need". They've done a fantastic job of all getting on the same page, I just wish the american tech worker did the same to at least counterbalance their narrative.
Speaking of trust, your comments are interesting and over the decades I've been struck by the symmetry and asymmetry between evoting systems and our heavily automated financial system. There is enormous financial reward to corrupt an e-voting system and enormous financial reward to provide a trustworthy secure financial system. No great surprise which system works and which system will never work.

The solution seems simple at first glance; scrap the entire voting system, scrap the entire fundraising system, and whichever candidate receives more individual $1 donations via check or money order wins. You can vote a dollar to as many candidates as you want but your federal tax return for that year is only getting a single $1 election credit. You could require the candidates to declare to the IRS each $1 contributor which makes election fraud also a form of income tax fraud.

Certainly, our financial marketplaces and clearinghouses at their absolute worst are more trustworthy and reliable than our evoting systems at their absolute best. And the additional infrastructure to transfer a hundred million bucks every four years is utterly trivial (well, more often due to primaries and midterm elections, but its still a drop in the bucket ...)

The anonymity emperor has no clothes, anyway. Thanks to the miracle of modern technology everyone who matters already knows exactly who you voted for and your complete financial life, you're just plausibly deniable on an individual basis against some non-state opfor some of the time. May as well face reality and make all votes part of the public financial record. Sure, it sucks. But better to face a reality you don't like, than to live in a fantasy world of completely broken anonymity. Living a lie means you'll slip up and the consequences of the slip up are likely worse than the lack of anonymity itself.
Yup - To do a proper write-up that would actually be interesting to read would require divulging IP.
I'm conflicted: On one hand this sounds like an absolutely terrible idea. Why would you try to make coal less smoggy, rather than focusing 100% on replacing the plant? On the other hand, if it works, it will probably improve the health of a lot of people living in the city.

Is it ethical to make people suffer, if it's for the sake of giving the people and the government more motivation to phase out coal power plants?
Meet the Plastic Surgeon Who Shares His Operations on Snapchat
Because while C++ offers the language features for writing good code, it doesn't prevent that many use it as "C with C++ compiler".

Which is both a path to its successful adoption as better C replaced, but also a curse to language improvements.

So we need languages that share the same spirit as C++ in programmer tooling, but don't allow copy-paste of C code.

Also because Ada compilers were too expensive and most younger generations of developers never heard of it.

Hence Rust, which while a good progress towards safety still needs to match C++'s IDEs, debugging tools and being available on OS vendors SDKs as first level language.

I am looking forward to it, but it still isn't quite there.
I think the "ahead of Trump meeting" makes what is effectively almost a tech story into a political one.
At buddybuild, we see tens of thousands of mobile projects from mobile dev teams.

Of the teams looking for cross platform solutions (versus native iOS or Android), Xamarin comes up on occasion.

However, React Native tends to be FAR more common as teams are looking for solutions for "write once, run on many"
>What we'd lose in expertise we'd more than gain in the lack of sociopaths and psychopaths.

I think far more likely these people would mostly just end up taking advice from whichever experts are left further down the hierarchies, who would then effectively run the country.
In all the German elections I participated the only people watching (apart from the regular citizens that are appointed official poll workers) were the few people showing their children how voting works - and they leave after a few minutes because let's be honest, counting ballots is rather boring. It would be nice if a few more people were watching the process.
This is also the biggest fallacy in economic, and even political theory. The assumption of rational actors.
IPv6 enabled Christmas Tree
What's the point of encrypting a video data stream if it's going to local storage that could be destroyed or taken by someone else, effectively depriving whoever shot the video of the footage?

Making encryption happen in the camera seems like solving the wrong problem - you really want to exfiltrate to secondary, offsite storage at high speed in a secure manner.
Show HN: ObjectiveIQ – The productivity tool your team loves to hang out in
It's working fine for us...
The article references http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=10279.msg99... which is old, experimental, somewhat faffy, and a bit buggy.
Well i could have sworn that the S in SD stands for Secure, and involves locking a card to a device.

Back when Microsoft rolled out Windows Mobile 7, they made use of this automatically. This caught many a new user off guard, and hilariously the only devices that could non-destructively unlock said cards were Nokia Symbian phones.
Yes. The larger the character space, the better. In fact, even today, I'm astounded by services that let me set passwords with "high" ASCII characters, like íÑVTx¾]õ^ÖcÉ^x½0ÞØý½
Probably some HR Buzword Bingo
Brought to you by Annual Reports LLC, the same company with such domains as annualmedicalreport.com and possibly the now-defunct annualworkreport.org.

Use at your own risk. I could find nothing that wasn't self-generated press about this person or company.
Your Tech Stack Is a Space Ship
Pretty sure that this little mini trend has reversed. I just read an article on it. Go google it if you care.
Of course its IBM bullshit. They get to tie hiring they needed anyway to some incentive that they will be negotiate.

They have an effective methodology for holding governments hostage and this is no different. You cannot blame IBM... they are making the noises that pandering politicians want to hear and driving value for their shareholders.
Containerd – a core container runtime project for the industry
why are you talking about America ? Parent did not. You also seem to confuse America with USA.
ChromeOS.

Probably Android from version 7 if OEM is using the two partition scheme. Of course if he is bothered enough to even provide updates in the first place.
FWIW, in Canada, it's highly dependent on the awareness of marketing and legal folks within companies to ensure that opted-out people do not get contacted.

If someone accidentally forgets to ensure the mailing list is cleaned out of people who've opted out, you could still be contacted.

The solution provided here is not scalable - basically every company in the world will have a list of opt outs by the time we're done. There needs to be something done at a higher level but that also comes with its own set of issues.

On my part, I have always asked people what they are going to do with an extract of customer information. Having an anti-spam law also lets me calculate what the costs will be if we get fined.
Probably. Even if it can't be automated (which doesn't sound too complicated), it wouldn't take many people to evaluate a photo of every cab interior once after every ride.
I'm not certain this has been thought through sufficiently. If an organization is in a position to confiscate the camera from a journalist, they're almost certainly ALSO in a position to extract the encryption password from the journalist.

It would be far better if the cameras automatically uploaded these photos[0], and could be configured to upload them somewhere outside of hostile reach, such as servers owned by the magazine/paper they work for.

A side issue is that being able to prove authenticity would be valuable, as the issue of faked news/images becomes more visible in the eyes of the general public. Having some sort of GPG signing of (image + gps time + gps position) would be valuable, although establishing the trust chain in practice would be quite difficult and requires some serious thought.

0: Yes, there's a question of how you get internet access in places such as the middle of a warzone, but something generic like wifi would allow individual papers to provide something like a satellite wifi bridge to enable uploads regardless of location (although the cost would obviously be large).
Science Guy Bill Nye Says Climate Adversaries Can Unite Around Innovation
Sorry as some one who did the vocational track no way do I fucking well consider myself anything other than white collar
I have yet to see a legitimate study which doesn't acknowledge directly or indirectly the cyclical climate trends. What they do tend to point out are data from the current period which are extraordinary in size or in scope.

"study it and try to understand all the causes without focusing on simplistic the sky is falling scares..." This is one such study. It's looking at a region and noting an unprecedented trend. Perhaps you meant to refer to the article's positioning, rather than to the study itself?
I think the logic likely goes like this. Coal power is cheap and cheap power allows industry to grow faster. Faster economic growth means faster growth of the people out of poverty. And since poverty kills through lack of education, nutritious food, good jobs and safe infrastructure, bad coal is still better than no energy, or energy so expensive it slows growth.
Also looks (at first glance) like it's only for stills (".CR2 and .JPG").
When Germany had problems with acid rains they did something similar (exhaust higher up) and had to stop because the only thing that happened was that acid rains spread to larger radius. Is this different because it's going to hit higher altitude?
Exfiltration in real time requires more bandwidth than you would have most of the time. It makes no sense to choose a "better" solution if it doesn't work.
And you definitely do not want the average consumer user trying to download drivers because they will inevitably find them on some shady downloadz site and end up ransomed or worse.
Here's a nice little graph of the last 12 years. The trend doesn't look good.

http://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/land-ice/
How Reviews Impact SEO Results
7 E-commerce Resolutions to Boost up your Sales in 2017
I'm Indian. I'' concerned about the air quality for my fellow citizens in Delhi, but an idea like this should never be allowed without proper scientific research of impact. What if blasting pollution to the upper atmosphere causes an even bigger problem?
India being a developing economy wouldn't have the money to fix that as well :-( and the coal plants would continue to run up Jet engines until it becomes another crisis because it makes business sense for them.

I can't see this idea ending well. Because a thorough scientific evaluation of impact isnt going to be cheap.. India might as well make deals for Nuclear plants for that money, or keep extending the already good use of solar and wind power setups.
The Evolution of Product vs. Strategy
Indeed. My bet is they will announce a "great deal" that will "create 1000's of tech jobs" and all the Trump had to give up was an increase to the H1B cap, another OPT extension and maybe even a tax break.
C developers don't even care about security, as shown by making the C99 security annex, which was pretty small actually, optional in C11.

Or they just like to wave the amount of CVE exploits that get added daily to the database, as not being a language issue.
how's that for mixing correlation & causation.

Sorta like, I've noticed that I have a good time when my bank account is low.

Low bank accounts must mean good life havin'!
First Amazon Prime Air Customer Delivery
I don't know how are they going to make a Java based application to be AGPLv3 compliant.

And I don't know if the source code be provided to every voter on request, as voting is the service provided by the machine.

Edit: Yeah, there are exemptions for voting machines in [A]GPLv3.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. It's the MO of airbnb, uber and other SV startups. We've seen more than once that making a land grab for a new market brings more long-term success than any penalties dished out for not playing by the rules.
You could just have the next person report it, which fines the previous person.