skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hadn't thought of it that way, but you're right. If you make a conscious decision not to vote, that is a valid way of expressing your opinion. But I doubt many non-voters are making that choice. Apathy or the belief that their vote won't make a difference are the biggest reasons people don't vote (at least based on the people I know who don't vote), and that is a problem.

I would rather people care enough to vote, no matter who they vote for - even if it means more crazy people in politics.
No action removes your right to complain. Many people may have their own legitimate reasons not to vote.

That said, those who don't must understand the implications of their actions (like the example you give).
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I'm not surprised he makes that argument. A higher voter turnout generally benefits the left, as the poor are less frequent voters. Everyone has the right to vote, informed or not, and I don't think anyone should undermine that right. There's always going to be someone making the argument that they are more informed.

Also, the only acceptable way to show that you don't want to vote is to go and cast a blank or invalid vote.
He rolled out a monthly payment package a few weeks ago
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I wouldn't argue that ideas are worth a lot, my point is that if the value of ideas is lower than that of various clunky mechanisms that attempt to make them excludable, that there will be no market.

That does not mean, though, that the ideas do not have any value, only that the vast majority if it lies in the execution rather than the idea itself.

For practical purposes, it doesn't change much, but the idea of "there's no market for it, so it's worthless" bugs me and I think it is not good economics. There are other things that we value that aren't directly bought and sold on 'natural' markets, or where markets must be artificially created via things like "intellectual property" or "cap and trade", government provisioning or other mechanisms like that, or where we simply accept that there's no viable way to make a market.

The classic example from economics (added for the benefit of other readers, you're surely familiar with it) is the lighthouse (which is also non-rivalrous): they're valuable to shipping, but generally, governments have provided them, because there was no way to make individual ships pay directly for their usage. They are not "worthless because there was no market for them".
Well, as the chance that the vote one casts is actually making a difference is so miniscule and the cost of informing yourself about the poltical agenda of parties rather high it is rational and utility maximising not to vote and to stay ignorant.

The "curse" of rational ignorance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance
That sounds amazing. Link?

(unless you were joking, but I still think NaRaRaMo is a great idea)
It seems to me the media outlets weren't reporting this because they were trying to be responsible and not add more people to the riots. They probably have standard practices that they don't report things like riots until after they are done for that reason.

But people are increasingly getting their news from random people on the internet, so that tactic doesn't have the effect it used to.

It saddens me that people think riots are a good thing, and that they should proudly claim to be in one.
"Damage"

I don't need a job right now and as I mentioned elsewhere, this kind of thing usually takes a company out of the running for me anyway.
Bryan Caplan argues that in his field (economics), uninformed votes don't cancel each other out. The average opinions of the uninformed (non-economist laymen) differ consistently from the average opinions of the informed (professional economists): http://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/11/06/bryan-caplan/the-myth...

I wouldn't be surprised if the same were true of other skills useful to high-quality voting, such as military strategy, education, criminology and history.
«The biggest problem with voting not being mandatory is
that a lot of people don't have the opportunity because
they can't get off work. If you made voting mandatory (or
at least made election day a paid holiday), this
impediment might be alleviated.»

An alternative, as it's done in Spain, is to give everyone the right to leave their jobs in order to vote. To alleviate things for businesses, all elections happen on Sundays.
Because, like it or not, that is the system and you can only change the system from within.

"I disagree with the system" is intellectually lazy and in my experience merely a cover story for apathy.
What's the alternative? I can't think of one that is morally acceptable.
Not in the usual sense, no. But his current state of communication problems would certainly be a "learning disability" in a typical school environment where things tend to be a bit faster paced, and teachers and students are often not as patient as people are with Mr. Hawking today.
I also find that the World News section of the Times is second to none (in terms of depth), and yes, that includes the BBC.
I agree (more or less) with the parent: If you don't vote, you lose the privilege of complaining.

But just because your candidate loses doesn't mean that your voice hasn't been heard. It's just that more people who voted disagree with you than agree with you.
Way past soliciting employment, stop fixating on a moot point. As I said, I don't actually need a job, I was curious about their company.
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I think you'll find that people in NSW wholly consider the state government to be mindless wankers, because they are. State governments all over Australia are completely inept. Most people will have someone in Federal politics that they like, though and I think the view generally of Federal politics is far less cynical, and where true political allegiances come to light.
If you don't vote and have a good reason for it, you have every right to complain.
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I agree. The BBC have more analysis here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2010...

The figure also includes Apple iTunes Store App purchases and Kindle subscriptions. But they're not broken down. For all we know 3 people could have bought direct access to the website and the other 99,997 people could have bought the App to read something on their iPhone while taking the train to work.

It's interesting to see that the Guardian are now earning around £40 million from on-line ad revenues. While the back of a napkin calculation by the BBC blogger puts The Times paywall at £7 million.
How will voting change the system if the system doesn't produce a candidate who can or will change it?
I think it's worth pointing out that "high school" in the UK finishes at 16, so he didn't so much as drop out of school as decide to not go to sixth-form/college (which is optional - and is usually two years and fits between high school and university).

Still it was a brave decision, and it obviously was the right one for him - it's a very impressive story! Congrats!
I had a wonderful run a few Sundays ago (well, wonderful for my middle-aged self), rolled home feeling great, then woke up in the middle of the night with a hot raw patch in the top of my mouth and a couple of days of misery coming on.

But I suspect it wasn't the cold coming on that did for me, on the one hand, more likely exposure to somebody with a new and improved bug a day or so before. And on the other hand, I'm not sure that co-workers who got to listen to me cough would have considered the run worth it.
I thought it would be an interactive console, like http://tryruby.org. Imagine being able to play with an API like that, with nothing to sign-up for or download and set-up.
I decided to try writing the same thing in JavaScript and discovered something really strange.

My first idea was:

numbers.map(function(x){return String.fromCharCode(x);}).join("");

This was pretty fast already, but why not eliminate the anonymous function completely and pass String.fromCharCode directly to map():

numbers.map(String.fromCharCode).join("");

I timed it and... ...this was ~100 times slower than the previous version. WTF!

Somehow passing this native function directly to Array.map() is way slower than wrapping it inside another function and passing that to Array.map().

I have tested it so far in Chrome, Firefox and Opera - the results are the same. I also tried forEach(), which behaves similarly.

Does anybody have an idea why this is so?

Update: I tried the same with Math.round and Math.sin, and with these the results were as one would expect: passing the function to Array.map() directly was a little bit faster than using intermediate anonymous function. So it seems the problem is with String.fromCharCode specifically.
Topics tend to cluster, as a topic is in peoples minds they tend to be more likely to find more articles and post them.
If 100% of eligible people voted, it still wouldn't be a pure democracy. It's not how the system is designed.

Our system is built on the assumption that most people don't have the time or capacity to understand all the issues, so we elect people to do the understanding for us.
Ah, yes, but it is $1 a month rather than $4.99 as the article reported:

http://www.instapaper.com/subscription
http://blog.instapaper.com/post/1256471940
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I like especially the explanation why Python has a proper modulo operator rather than the mathematically really annoying one of C (and most other languages):

http://docs.python.org/faq/programming#why-does-22-10-return...
Why don’t you vote on Sundays like I don’t know how many other nations in the World? It doesn’t make any sense.
There is no reason to abstain in Australia because we have a preference system. In the States, when Nader ran against Gore it divided the Democrat vote and Bush won. The same thing doesn't happen in Australia so if you vote for a minor party because you really believe in their policies, although they may still preference a major party that you don't wholly agree with they still get funding based on the number of votes received and if they actually win a seat in parliament (as Adam Bandt did in his recent historic win in the federal seat of Melbourne for the Greens) then those "minor" parties start to have a "major" influence.

All in all I think the preference system and mandatory voting makes for a far healthier democracy.
Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Your Apps to APIs
Personally I would prefer a monarchy, or some merit based voting system - eg You get a vote if you can demonstrate you have the understanding to make informed decisions.
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Just curious but was that on a CPC or CPM basis? I've always theorized CPM based advertising on Facebook is useless since the page gets reloaded so often.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. It seems like you're saying that to be a democracy it must be that everyone has a say/vote in every decision made about every issue. Is that right?
But you have to pay Murdoch to read it.
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Located in Congleton, the ancient Cheshire town by the outskirts of the Peak District national park, a converted mill with a history dating back to the 1900s has been transformed to create a thoroughly modern business centre which offers flexibly termed office space rental options for small and medium business concerns. Providing serviced spaces and a variety of facilities for commerce, these work spaces have turned out to be popular with small to medium enterprises seeking a part time , exceptionally well serviced office according to a recent article by leading online property consultants officebroker.com. Business directors can select shorter or longer term renting options with a great number of services and amenities which are available for renting on a very convenient, all inclusive basis. Subsequent to an increase in new start-up businesses in 2010, the popular Cheshire business centre has noticed an increased number of new enquiries from new business directors, freelancers and professionals and, as a result, has adjusted one part of the business centre to accommodate new firms on a shared space basis. Located on the bottom level of the building the shared workspace is within easy reach of all main facilities inc. the well managed reception, meetings rooms and kitchen and provides a pleasant atmosphere for tenants that want a professional location which allows them to focus on their business. Business directors are able to occupy the flexible area by the month, by week, and even by the hour, which is targeted at directors that are very mobile and require an office space for just a relatively small number of hours to allow them a chance to carry out office based tasks such as documenting their work or replying to emails. Despite having just recently launched the new, flexible, multi-occupant option the Congleton team already has plans to grow their popular offering.
It's notable that they expect to "lose 90%" of those subscribers when they end the current "£1 for a month" introductory offer, which is being pushed by a huge celebrity-endorsed advertising campaign on the London underground. So the actual figure is nearer 10,000 subscribers.

What IS interesting though is the potential to walk away from the advertising model to achieve less biased news. It's Murdoch, so it won't happen, but it would be a fascinating experiment. Shamelessly borrowing from Chomsky's "Propaganda Model" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model), mass media can never truly hold discussion & debate beyond the framework laid down by the interests of business. Whether journalists recognize it or not, there will always be limits on what they can say. Because to publish truly controversial material would be to terminate your public voice (i.e. no advertising, no revenue, no company).

The Web, with near-zero distribution costs, is the first time in history that it has become economical viable to escape advertising, by only needing to charge people a modest amount: the principle cost is investigative journalism, and there is a very helpful correlation between "well-connected Web user" and people who believe it is important to support an independent media outlet.
The Immediate Criticism Mechanism
I think your idea (part b, anyway) is based on the idea that people vote for parties, but that's not the way it works. True, some states allow you to vote a straight party ticket rather than having to vote for each office individually, but not all of them.

In the US each elected official, whether they were a Democrat nominee, a Republican nominee, or a member of one of the other parties chooses who they will caucus with. That's why people like Arlen Specter can change parties freely.

And allocating seats based on the percentage of people who voted in each state ignores those who don't have the right to vote - whether they're children, foreigners, or people in other categories. Once someone is elected, they're supposed to serve their entire constituency, not just those who voted for them.

And finally, the US (and no country that I can think of, really) is not a democracy, it is a democratic republic. The many elect a few to govern, and those elected to govern are supposed to do what is right - and what is right is not always what the majority wants.
In Estonia you can vote from almost anywhere if you have ID-card and working internet connection.

It's really convenient and people are using this more and more. For example last elections 15.75% of votes were made using internet. Official statistics can be found from http://vvk.ee/voting-methods-in-estonia/engindex

Also there are talks that they want to enable voting with mobile phones (there are already solutions where you can log in to banks and other websites with mobile phones).
I wonder how large (or small) that restricted subset is and how easily it is 'violated', turning off the optimization although it would have been possible (For example, the global hash could be referred to via a local variable which might carry the result of a function call). Do you have any insights on that?

Until then, using a 'dirty flag' on the `chr` definition that turns off the optimization at run time as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, seems to be the appropriate approach for me.
Great idea! There is a ton of social science about why it is irrational to vote (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance). If one had to pay even a low penalty similar to Australia that may help to convince rational but disappointed, ignorant and hopefully peaceful people to vote..
It might be a similar effect but it's not the same effect. There's a definite difference between wanting to say that you are making the effort to take part in the electoral process but that you don't want to lend your support to any of the candidates; and for whatever reason not correctly filling out the ballot paper. If nothing else it makes for a much more interesting statistic, spoiled ballot papers tell you nothing about the intent of the voter, a 'none of the above' option would help with that.
In a perfect system, I would like to see voting require a license. People require a driver's license because uneducated drivers can harm others. Uneducated voters can cause similar harm to others.

Taken to the extreme, you could have a direct democracy where individuals vote directly for proposed bills, bypassing the (usually vested) middleman. Voters would have to pass some competency exam on the subject of the bill before being allowed to cast a vote. In other words, you can't vote on internet regulation if you don't know how to access a web page.

The reason there will never be a license to vote is because you transfer an immense about of power to those who create the exams. Influence the exams and you decide the election. In addition, by putting up barriers towards voting, you decrease overall participation in the election, possibly alienating the general population.

Perhaps a better, more realistic option is to move towards direct democracy while simultaneously improving as much as possible education.
Stuff like this that make me visit HN ;)
BT trials WiFi broadband on London Underground
This is even much better than to penalize. Why isn't there a startup helping the government? :) http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/23/the-goldmine-of-opportuniti...
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Lack of imagination is another symptom of apathy. Doing nothing will not change the system, but it will perpetuate it.
Just a guess: your anonymous function cannot be redefined (because there is no name), but String.fromCharCode could potentially be. Thus, a similar reason as mentioned in the article for global vs. local variables.

One would think that String.fromCharCode is looked up only once, though.
What are the hidden cost of cloud computing?
That's a very cool idea. Especially nice is the sharing functionality which I imagine could be a way to show-off robots to other users. I hope Lego doesn't mind or if it matters that they do.
I suspect a lot of people as disabled as Mr Hawking is never had the chance for anyone to discover they weren't cognitively impaired, let alone geniuses. People would take one look at the twisted limbs and stuff the poor kid off in a home, and let the kid's brain shrivel.

That's one of the ideas behind mainstreaming: put the kids into mainstream environments, with assistance as needed, in order to bring out whatever potential might be there. (Kinda like with 'normal' kids, expose them to art to bring out artistic talents, etc.)

Mainstreaming is not only about cognitive impairment. It's disabilities in general. Taking the deaf kid, the kid in a wheelchair, or the kid with a cognitive impairment, and putting them in classes with non-disabled kids, rather than isolating them with others 'of their own kind'.
How will voting change the system if no candidate is willing to change it? And just to be clear, I didn't say I'm not voting or that I think the system is broken. I'm asking you to explain your position.
As for me, any person can learn anything if there's enough motivation. If you really want doing small business, consider your role in it and apply for corresponding posistion. Although it may be usefull to work in the bigger team for a while (espessially if you have no "explosive" ideas).
You see, in small team your decision often comes last point. Very often there's no one to guide, to prove you wrong. Just take a measure of responsibility.
True - I didn't vote in one election because I was unavoidably away from home, and the postal voting form didn't arrive until after I'd left. It didn't stop me complaining.
I'm curious as to how an economics field alters perception (I know votes are scarce, economists study individual choice, etc... But votes technically hold no value). I'd be more interested in a polisci / pollster / statistician perspective.

I'm also a little leery of anything coming out of the Cato Institute. If this was a published study, that would be different. Given that the author is a professor, I'm willing to give him a little slack, but I'd rather see the opinion peer-reviewed. I don't follow economics well enough to know of any contrarian points of view.

The author's main point seems to be that just because some people can vote, doesn't mean that they should vote. What he doesn't address is why the noise from the uninformed doesn't cancel out. Or more accurately, why wouldn't more noise be better noise? He states that the errors compound, but he never really give a good reason why (at least in my skimming).

I still maintain that the current distribution of uninformed voters isn't uniform. There was a study a while ago (but I can't remember the citation) that said that an increate in even uninformed opinions strengthened predictive power. So in this case more idiots were better idiots. I wish I remember what field this was in though...
That probably means it's a good idea to not exert yourself once the cold has hit.
> Anxiety makes me draw blanks and stutter

I know this may not sound very helpful (I too resisted at first), but have you tried to seek specialized help? A good therapist should be able to help you deal with whatever issues you have that could be causing the condition. It's like hiring an experienced bug fixer.
My experiences agree, BUT, London is not representative of the UK as a whole.

Also, people on commuter tubes into central London are not even representative of all the people in London.

Also, if anything, I think I still see more Blackberries than iPhones or Androids.
Remember that you don't vote to make a difference, you vote because it's your obligation to do so.

That's crap. Why should I feel obligated to do something that has no affect on anything?

(I'm not saying that's definitively the case, but your statement implies that you should vote even if your vote doesn't matter. Why?)
Kieran Duffey : The first wealth is health
Kieran Duffey says lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it. If you don't have confidence, you'll always find a way not to win. The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt.
> Are introns bad? An outside observer might think so, but something about the overall algorithm must like them...

Just because an algorithm tends to produce an unwanted result does not mean it's suddenly desirable. Yes, introns are bad.

Credentials: My dissertation and several subsequent publications were on the subject of introns.
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Also you get huge subsidies in Germany for putting in solar power to the net.