skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are actually elaborate rules and measures on the handling of paper ballots to work around complicated schemes that have been devised to defraud the vote. It's certainly not foolproof.

Problems with paper voting:

- Fraud
- Counting time
- Margin of error

Problems with electronic voting:

- Hacking
- Cost
- Programming bugs
- Machine error
- Scalability

Actual way voting is handled

- Some states use mailed paper ballots
- Some states use paper-free voting
- Some states use a mixture of electronic and paper voting

The biggest risk is not the mechanism, but the way it is implemented: 5,000 independent jurisdictions all have completely independent ways of choosing how to vote, and then completely independent methods of implementing it. [3]

This[1] testimony from 2001 includes a good history of the voting process and the reasons why it is handled the way it is. The parent[2] directory contains 16 years of commentary articles.

[1] http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/congress.html [2] http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/index.html [3] http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/PutinTrump.sht...
I would suggest that for each of them, a 10+ year career in academic cryptography, in each case accompanied by significant new research results, is what helped them get there. Implementing a library, not so much.

As for your second point: literally everyone can implement cryptography that appears secure to them. It's tautological.
To nitpic a little bit, much of iOS is in fact Open Source. Darwin and the XNU kernel public repos are updated by Apple after each release of their OSes.

Definitely not as Open as Linux, but not closed source either.
I tried this for few times. but none of them ended well. either I helped my friends on their ideas or my friends helped on mine. and one of us will lose interest first.

there has been no single case where we, as a team, are interested in the same thing.
I'd like to question your view.

First, you've omitted a major downside of digital vs. paper systems, scalability. Attacks on paper systems are much harder to scale, are more easily detected and more readily audited by staff who need no IT training/experience. There are other downsides, but scalability is a good example.

Second, the "plenty of upsides" are mere niceties. I don't know of any must-haves unique to digital voting systems. What do they offer that is worth their diminished security compared with paper ballots?

I put security of our electoral process at top priority. Given the difference in attack surfaces of digital systems vs. paper ballots, I can't see a case for the former.

The continuing parade of breaches of supposedly super secure systems indicates we don't yet know how to code systems for large-scale public applications where security is absolutely essential. Paper ballots are the best we have for now.
It's 11.9 GB of text (5.3 GB zipped). So smaller than quite a few video game downloads.
Reach 20k journalists at one place and tell them your startup story
Indeed, I believe it really is that simple.
There's also the possibility that he was the target of some blackhat shenanigans:

https://twitter.com/hostshell/status/893155033084252161
Note how he explicitly recognizes how everybody has their own best style. Nowhere does he encourage arguing about style details.
Ahhh yes. I remember the good old days when tech books were half decent. Good times.
> The hacks at Defcon all took a long time to do

90 minutes or less, from unprepared attendees, some of which didn't even know they would be seeing a voting machine that day [1].

> Also voting machines generally have paper copies that print off the back of the machine

This wasn't always the case, and a few bad elections happens from 2004-2006 as a result. There is also not a guarantee the voter has checked/understood the paper receipt. Overall the concept helps quite a bit.

> The only plausible hack would be an inside job

Polling station staffers are volunteers, and there are lots of them. Not particularly difficult.

Voting machines themselves are known to store results in unencrypted, easily editable MS Access databases. This allows editing/suppression of votes en masse with no trail. If said attacker can find a way to also tamper with the paper receipts (print a different result that the voter doesn't notice, or don't print at all, or make the printout unreadable), mass shenanigans could ensue.

All this just to say, "hey, it uses paper for verification on the backend, so it's fine." But we're paying companies to develop insecure machines, training voters to trust them, and bringing the integrity of our democracy into question along the way.

Just fill out a piece of paper. It's not that hard to count the votes.

1. http://fortune.com/2017/07/31/defcon-hackers-us-voting-machi...
How Netflix DDOS'd Itself To Help Protect The Entire Internet
Thanks for this correction!

I would say citing all those French diacritics is cheating a bit. The diaeresis is just used to indicate separate syllables, and ù and ÿ are not a thing in standard French.

Polish is uniquely bad not because of the diacritics, but because of the special phonetic behavior of digraphs ('si', 'ci', 'zi', 'rz', 'sz', 'cz', 'ch', 'dż', 'dź', 'dzi').
Who trusts digital money?
python -m http.server
Hardware kill switches for camera, microphone, and fully open source software down to the firmware and bios. No proprietary blobs at all.
Just go at page 17

http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/SingularityisNear_Chapter1....

and see the kind of bogus things he puts together to fit his narrative of accelerating shifts. He puts no paradigm shift between the apparition of city states the invention of the printing press but he separates the inventions of computers and the invention of personal computers as two paradigm shifts.

I did not check all the sources he uses in the graph page 19 but I suspect the same bias: we ascribe more importance to events closer to us than to events further in the past.
I can remember the number, but I've forgotten the password :-) I tried to get them to reset it a while back but it's tied to a long dead email address so I've no way to verify it's me and they won't help.
Miranda was awesome. Simple, light, native, and supported many protocols. I miss that kind of software on the desktop.
We have different ideas about 'drops in the ocean' :-) See this article (http://fortune.com/2017/06/28/elon-musk-china-battery/) for some numbers. Projected Gigafactory production (as more come on line) could continue to be 25 to 35% of the global production of batteries.

My father-in-law, who is a big booster of South America, feels that if Argentina, Brazil, and Chile got together they could move up the 'value chain' and produce batteries for export. I do know that much of the raw lithium comes from Argentina and Chile so I expect there is some truth to that idea.
Sign up then immediately cancel? One month's payment should go through.
This article seems to speak unfavourably towards building a basic BI infrastructure. I don't know why. There is immense value for having a single trusted source of truth where the most basic business questions can be answered ad hoc, with a suite of simple visualizations and KPIs that cover the most important facts of how the business is doing. Data like this serves as a crucial element of communication across different departments in the company.

One use of a strong BI infrastructure, that is under-appreciated, is as a sort of test suite for the business. If an important metric changes, it's extremely costly if it is not discovered very quickly. This also can lower the cost of business risks. In other words there can be much value in visible data that points to nothing new. BI isn't just a method to look for business improvements, though it certainly can be that, as well.

BI and data warehousing infrastructure doesn't replace more targeted and specific data science projects, it complements them.
Hate to sound pessimistic to your well-intentioned suggestion, but if someone prefers not to support a creator monthly/regularly, then they are unfortunately choosing not to support them sustainably. I feel strongly that to ask for one-off giving is to ask for a badly designed system. People can't dedicate their output to creating value for you when they're living off a tip-jar. Consistency is the key to backgrounding the profit-motive, and allowing for the creativity you've probably come to appreciate in their work :)

Disclaimer: quit my job to contribute to Gittip community, and have lots of a thoughts and feels on the patron/gratitude economy
To make critical fixes to packages in the standard
library, one must wait 6 months for a new version
of Go to ship (or a point release has to be shipped
in the case of security issues, which drains
team resources).

I realize the article suggests breaking more functionality out into external projects to get around this, but I'll also advocate for a shorter release cycle. 6 weeks makes more sense than 6 months, IMO. I'd be curious to hear arguments for the long cycles though, as so far I haven't been convinced.
You think that's bad? My damn BANK has the following password policy for online banking:

The password you create here can be used to access Online, Mobile and Telephone Banking.
All passwords must be six characters in length. Special characters (eg. *, %, $, etc) will not be accepted.
Congress Is Heading for a Confrontation with Sessions Over Marijuana
It means that all those robo fintech companies and the Vanguards of the world are making a lot of money, but "buy and hope" is not a good retirement strategy for the little guy, especially if you are close to retirement and you have some money set aside and count on them to live off...
I see your chipsy and raise you tipsy.

Not because there's anything wrong with it, that is.

It's just always puts a smile on my face when I walk past a tipsy nail salon with a sign that means euphemistically, to my British ears, being on the path to getting properly drunk.
Thank you. I still have this argument with people today. I think it's laziness for many devs. ASI is an _error correction mechanism_ that Eich added because there was no compile step in JS in 1995. It helped people ship code without having to spend forever tracking down missed semicolons or worry about getting bit by one in an undertested code path. It is part of the language. If you hate semicolons that much, go write VB/Ruby/Python...
Portable computers sort of do that.

I had a vague idea that I had heard something similar before:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-reveals-secret-server-ha...
> If I earn a small amount of money in a place with low cost of living, then I can't move to a high cost of living location later.

Having done this out of school, I found myself literally borrowing money for first/last/security. Not much money, and not for long, but that's of course because I had a signed contract before I settled on an apartment. Cheap living is pleasant, but it can leave you in a serious cash crunch should you try to move - especially as a young person.
Who's "we?" I don't trust digital money :P
Time limitations.

With current US primary+secondary curricula, most non-remedial students still only get as far as differential calculus before graduating high school - electronics and discrete math are already missing from that, and "concrete programming demonstrations" would strain the schedule even more.
correct.

The problem with digital voting is that it needs to be anonymous who votes for what. That makes the problem much much harder.
eVacs!

https://lwn.net/Articles/44077/
http://www.softimp.com.au/evacs/products.html
In fact the court is concerned with justice, which absolutely depends on good and bad as opposed to the strictures of the law.
Thanks a ton for hckr news. Great resource.
I'm not upset per se but it is troubling that with his vast resources and seemingly good faith effort he was unable to make any dent at all in his energy consumption. It certainly makes it seem impossible to achieve for someone with lesser means.

It is probably a bit unfair to say he lives there alone, though, aim sure he hosts a lot of parties, fundraisers, etc. And he has a security detail which probably also requires lots of electricity. And so on.

I would of course as a data person be extremely interested in these details.
That's a bit easier with a medium where in which small file sizes are considered part of the art form and most of the content is ~64KB
A summary of the book from the above article:

"Reading Debt is no substitute for serious study of economics... But if you do get your economics from Debt, you will at least come away with a few important ideas. First, that money contracts come before, and are about more than, the exchange of goods. Second, that some monetary systems are based on commodity money and some are based on credit, and the two behave quite differently. Third, and most urgently, that decisions about the money supply are not "too important and technical" for democracy. On the contrary, they are too important and inherently political to be made any way except democratically.

"Debt’s economic arguments are not always presented as clearly as they could be. But none of them are present at all in the typical economics textbook. They are, on the other hand, found in some form or another in the thought of a great many rebels, heretics and reformers within the economics profession."
I don't know Haskell but this looks like Phantom Types in Scala.

Can anyone who knows both languages enlighten us ?

More on Scala Phantom types here https://gigiigig.github.io/tlp-step-by-step/phantom-types.ht...
Like the article itself?
I think we may be in the "empire strikes back" phase.
There are lock design where short of brute-forcing you can't gain any useful information. But in a way locks are hard to equate to digital concepts because typical locks are laughably insecure and can be bypassed with a $30 Amazon purchase and a few seconds of time on the lock.
Spy agency has spy tools. I am shocked.
> maybe you should refrain from posting until you have actual facts in hand?

Yeah, like the rest of the people commenting here, right? They have all the facts.
Then we can debate whether or not a bubble has been completely filled in. Or if a "hanging Chad" counts as a vote.
Comcast, Google Can Publish Users' Email Contents
the owners of the coins will complain, they will do so on forums where they can do so anonymously and the credibility/trust of the mixer is called into question. (These tend to be forums where the users are in need of bitcoin mixing services e.g darknet markets or hackign forums) These mixing operations work on trust, as long as they are trusted people will use them, one too many stories about missing coins and it will be seen as a scam and avoided.
Clickbait Frenzy Over 50 Year Old NASA Planetary Protection Officer Position
Paper ballots can be destroyed easily too:

I remember this in San Francisco in 2001,

http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Scavenged-ballot-box-...
One might even argue that being a professional anything (at least, a successful one at it) is about cultivating relationships with people who either have money (investors), have network, or have power (to hire you, etc.). This applies even for software engineers. Even the greatest software engineers in the world won't get very far by just sending job applications on a job listing site.
The Texas summer is brutal [1].

Last month my average home used between 100 and 120 kwh per day [2].

Luckily we rarely have to heat in the winter - although it's not uncommon to have the A/C running for Christmas.

[1]: http://www.statesman.com/news/local/wipe-that-brow-austin-re...

[2]: http://imgur.com/a/45oGu
UK's National Cyber Security Centre on MalwareTech's arrest:
"We are aware of the situation. This is a law enforcement matter and it would be inappropriate to comment further."

https://twitter.com/josephfcox/status/893160214664445952
>> this sounds very much like something the US will do.

As an American this sounds very much like something many, many, many countries around the world would do.
I work for Google cloud. Will ping internally about us hosting it.
"my approach to code formatting is the best. If it weren't, I wouldn't use it. Formatting is part of my being - an extension of my genetic makeup. And, when I write code, my formatting is the fingerprint that I leave behind. When I'm asked to change my style, I am - quite literally - asked to deny a fundamental Truth of my being."

This is some seriously arrogant, even anti-social (coding) shit. I'm sure his approach is the best. And the next person will say the same. Pretty soon, you're stuck because you can't agree on style and you've wasted all the time debating style. Get an automated formatter and be done with it. Or do it manually in a consistent style. Such arrogant attitudes don't belong anywhere in the professional world. Imagine if people said that about blueprints and CAD drawings. Nothing would ever get built.
>Converting these mixed coins on a large scale to something like dollars is very very hard. Most exchanges that interact with the traditional banking system do check where you got the money from. It's not like you can send $1M worth of tumbled coins to Bitstamp/Kraken/Coinbase and convert them to dollars without tons of paperwork. And it's not like you can buy a house/car/boat with these coins and expect the IRS not to show up.

This nicely explains why the Mexican cartels (in their simplicity) used US dollars and not Bitcoins ;).

But I still wonder about the paperwork, it completely escapes me.

I mean, there are mainly three "legit" ways to actually become in possession of a Bitcoin:

1) mining it

2) buying it (i.e. giving real money in exchange for it), let's say as an investment

3) accepting the Bitcoin as payment for any service, good, etc.

Why any of the above (that have more or less a proven/provable origin and thus that can justify the provenance of the Bitcoin and somehow do the appropriate paperworks) would want to use a mixer?

Or - differently put - once you Bitcoin has gone through the mixer isn't it not anymore suitable to any exchange requiring this paperwork?
I.e. it becomes "unspendable" money (if not in very small quantities, small amount single operations, limited quantities of operation).

Or am I missing something?
Also available on Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/don-t-fuck-wi...
Open Source Voting Machines - with a take-away symmetric key paper receipts for auditing.
In my old team's case, the shift was 10am-10pm either Mon-Thu or Fri-Sun. If you needed to commute or grab lunch or something, you just had to coordinate with the secondary oncaller to cover for you for a half-hour or whatever.

Stuff like bathroom visits, showers, etc aren't usually a big deal since 1) we didn't get paged that often (see the SRE Book on proper alerting design) and 2) three minutes is longer than you'd think. Usually plenty of time to "wrap things up" and get back to your laptop.

If your internet dropped out, you'd either switch to tethering, get your secondary to cover while you drove to the office or a coffee shop, or worst case contact your manager to help find emergency coverage.

Normally when I was oncall, I'd be on the couch playing video games or watching a movie with my work laptop nearby and logged into a shell on my work desktop.
I'd suggest you to try it first, renting someone's boat for a month or so.

I had similar idea and found someone renting boat when interned in San Francisco. but eventually due to other reasons, I didn't take the boat.

at the time, I knew nothing about sailing. then, one of my friends, who is in the Berkeley sailing club, took me to sailing for few times. I started to change my mind.

I can't use a laptop on a boat. it's too shaky even docked. the moisture and the smell of an old boat is also bad.

I predict I can at best live on a boat for a week. plus, there is no shower on the boat.

I'd suggest you try it first before making decision.
And yet - somewhat hilariously, Polish is one of the easiest languages out there in terms of knowing how to pronounce the written word.

Spend a week or two practising a pronunciation guide and that's pretty much well it.

Reading something out loud for the first time? Native level accuracy 95% of the time, easy.

Compared with the absolute crap shoot which is English or - my nightmare - French, reading Polish out loud is an absolute walk in the park.
TIL

Thanks. :)
Decryptocat isn't the lighter end of things. Snowden used it to communicate with Glenn Greenwald's associates during the same time period Decryptocat was found (there are worse flaws in that software than Decryptocat, by the way).

Now you see the issue!
> I would suggest that for each of them, a 10+ year career in academic cryptography, in each case accompanied by significant new research results, is what helped them get there. Implementing a library, not so much.

I believe that what made them exceptional (for most of them) is the combination of theoretical learning and hands-on programming. That's my entire point. I think we can agree to disagree. But that's an opinion I'll probably hold for the next years as this is the direction I want to take as well.

> As for your second point: literally everyone can implement cryptography that appears secure to them. It's tautological.

And the process of putting it out there and looking for ways to make it more secure is how you learn. Proof: he already learned a bunch about Frama-C and other C oddities and documented these via his blogpost. Plus he found a bug in the Argon2 implementation. That's a win.
For Firefox users: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Preferences...
The grandparent is making a good point. It is entirely possible that the researcher is being prosecuted for something related to his past. It's not likely that he's being prosecuted for smuggling a small amount of drugs (for example), the FBI wouldn't be the one making the arrest.
Even if all the activities he has done in the past are completely legal the FBI could still try to wring him for them.
Ya well calling it a cult is a pretty extreme exaggeration.
Half of them are, the other half are the 'matching' pairs that don't exist in Russian (for example). Soft ш and ж, hard ч and щ.
Correct. I have not studied securities law but I don't think Coinbase's users have any recourse claiming their BCC and Coinbase decides their stance is that it was always theirs as they held the relevant private keys.
It would be foolish to depend on that for any use case where it actually matters whether Mozilla can read the files, though.
Don't lithium-ion batteries degrade extremely quickly, though? Won't these all be down to half capacity or so within a decade?

Is it really worth investing in gargantuan quantities of energy storage if they need to be replaced every few years? I'd be eyeing EDLC technologies or something like molten salts over giant stationary phone/laptop/car/etc batteries.
You mean like Defcon Beijing?
Can you trust that you won't be punished for voting the "wrong" way? Or maybe you won't get that raise that you were seeking out because you belong to the wrong party. Paper ballots keep things anonymous and make it difficult to track who voted for whom. With "digital money" it does not mater as much if people can see who exchanged monies.
Yes. The fact that HN is sympathetic to Tesla is not more surprising than it's unusual interest in bicycle lanes and life extension. But name calling doesn't help at all. Better would be to link to high-quality criticism, write it yourself, or minimally just point out imbalance without inflammatory language.
>IHS Markit expects li-ion battery prices to fall below $200/kWh by 2019

In that article they claim the digit of $200, while you can buy an assembled 1kw/h battery pack in China in retail quantities for around $120 today.
Bassel Safadi an Internet pioneer was executed by Syrian regime in the detention
OCR in the browser