skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Laser printers plugged into UPS's aren't great (and then there was my previous boss who destroyed a pretty large unit by repeatedly boiling a kettle from it during a power cut), but it's worth pointing out that the OP had his laser plugged into the same circuit as the UPS but not onto the battery - I took that to mean it's on the same radial/ring/breaker rather than connected to the UPS at all.

I'm guessing the surge current to the laser was causing the UPS to register a brownout and potentially not behave correctly at that point.
>There are some real concerns with vote by mail.

Any others apart from the voter roll problem?

In my state (RI), I have to affirmatively send in a mailed request for a ballot, so the voter roll thing doesn't really enter into the picture.
If you liked this check out the video I made where I show the level generator in details, also the game itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg4oYA9ToZs
It's not as if signatures are going to do that. Especially not any of the types of fraud that involve coercion or payment for votes. If you're paying someone for their vote they can still sign their name. One of the reasons it needs to be secret is to make it impossible for anyone to verify that you voted the way they want you to.

I still don't understand how voting in person is supposed to be any more problematic than e.g. buying groceries in person. Wear a mask, stand six feet apart etc., what's the problem?
It seems this link should be mentioned in the email the OP got.
Encrypted notes in Bitwarden or lastpass works for me.

IANASP. (I Am Not A Security Professional)
I don't understand why voter ID is such a big deal in the United States. In my country (Sweden) you cannot vote without identifying yourself with a state-issued ID card or passport, no exceptions. If you for some reason lack both you need to have someone that can affirm your identity (and they need to show their own identification papers). Nobody complains about it because it is a necessary precondition for a fair and rigorous democratic system and everyone implicitly agrees upon this. If you don't like it then don't participate.

I don't buy the argument that it disenfranchises voters. Even the poorest in my country are able to vote despite having these voter ID restrictions. India also has some form of voter ID too, and their population is almost triple the American population and substantially poorer.

I can't help but think that there is some kind of malicious intent behind the opposition to voter ID, but it is unfortunately very difficult to prove.
Unlikely, as the census can’t share granular census information with other parts of the government for decades. You need improvements in how voting rolls are updated and kept current (I’ve seen voting registration been done at the same time as acquiring a drivers license or state ID at a DMV, for example).

There is a lot of power in leaning on existing online resources for performing this work, where your identity and address verification has already been performed (or it can rapidly be performed in a way that is both inexpensive to government and so frictionless it does not disenfranchise the disadvantaged). You just need competent government leadership and technology practitioners who can rapidly glue it together (I know, crazy high hill to climb).
> but the government doesn’t know who lives in a specific house. So weird.

This seems to me a feature, not a bug.
Probably, as TurboC was a bit late to the game. But I'm not sure.
It might depend on where you're located. My wife was recently looking for a < $1000 bike in Denver and it involved going all over town and checking every store that sold bikes. $2000-$3000 was generally what stores had on the shelf. We asked a few places what was going on and they were saying that the <$1000 bikes were hard for them to order and anything they got in would sell the same day.

She eventually got lucky and found a 2yr old used bike for $400 which is exactly what she wanted. She just got lucky and got to the store just as they were putting it out on the floor.
Yes thats what aerobic decomposition does. But peat bogs are a carbon sink. Unless we dig it up that carbon stays locked away. Future coal.

I also never said anything about the peat industry as a whole, all I said was how digging it up releases CO2.
This is called archiving, everyone needs a good archive system, all finished cases get archived, archives older than 5 years are thrown away.
There is no federal system, so it's left to the states. Unfortunately some states are good at some things and shitty at others. Take my state...we rarely have vote by mail issues (100% for at least a decade now), but we also gave hundreds of millions to Nigerian scam artists in unemployment benefits recently. All governments have very poor performance when they require scaling up a system quickly...so do many companies, but sadly they seem to have people who are better equipped and motivated to do so.
> there isn't much they can do legally to make any of this actually exist.

Please, let's stop the whole thing of "he doesn't have the power to do this". Maybe he cannot do everything, but the last four years have proved that he can do pretty much everything he wants with a few minor problems with justice that he will also disregard. Think about mass imprisonment of immigrants, travel bans, attacking protestors in major cities with unidentified military units, diverting money fro the military to build a wall against congress wishes, not allowing his co-conspirators to testify in Congress, affirm he will not accept the election results, etc. All of these things supposedly were not legal. But he doesn't care about the constitution, and the constitution only has any power if the government is willing to uphold it.
Maybe you own the content, and maybe there's no ads, but it sure looks like you don't get to control the content - and a popup is obnoxious whether it's selling you diet pills, or the ability to do exactly the thing you're doing.
You miss the point entirely.

Currently because the volume of bogus support requests is so enourmously high, and the fraud attempts also very high - the cost to properly do something like handle account lockout requests properly (on the scale of billions of users) would be EXTREMELY high.

Google is actually pretty clear for consumer accounts, if you lock yourself out your content is lost and they suggest setting up a new account.

Cell phone companies do handle this, you can do things like sim swaps etc with a real person - but you are usually paying $50 - $100 per MONTH with them. And even there plenty of folks have complained of having 2FA codes stolen as a result of this convenience.

If they could charge $50 or $100 to provide paid support (a situation that is actually very COMMON at the enterprise level) for at least some people this will be worth doing. Then the business case is there to staff / resource etc the fix.

Currently, with youtube / gmail etc, the revenue per user is so low it will NEVER make economic sense to have humans dealing with an account.

But keep on banning paid support and you'll keep on getting no support.
It is amazing how many problems in the US exist simply because the government lacks knowledge about its people. From the census, to maintaining voter rolls, to mail in voting, to general voter fraud, to stimulus checks going to dead people, to identity theft caused by overuse of SSNs, it could all be solved by having a central database that is updated whenever one of us is born or dies.
Energy and nutritional requirements, longer time before reaching adulthood. For humans one of the limiting factor is the female pelvis. Births become more difficult.
Tasks that are writing to disk, network outage wouldn't stop the task?
Some disagree about that:

> Generally the better educated are more prone to irrational political opinions and political hysteria than the worse educated far from power. Why? In the field of political opinion they are more driven by fashion, a gang mentality, and the desire to pose about moral and political questions all of which exacerbate cognitive biases, encourage groupthink, and reduce accuracy. Those on average incomes are less likely to express political views to send signals; political views are much less important for signalling to one’s immediate in-group when you are on 20k a year.

https://dominiccummings.com/2017/01/09/on-the-referendum-21-...
Hasn’t this been fought against for ages? There’s a reason it’s a mishmash of state driven solutions instead of one big federal ID database.

Not to mention the groups who fight against using any form of identification at all during voting.
Yeah, I think that's valid. I just wanted to be sure we also weren't overselling :-P
I wonder if the signatures actually didn't match, or if someone bulk-challenged votes based on demographics (either perceived from the name or from an actual list of registered voters by campaign contributions or zip codes).
I keep seeing people say "user error" to these problems as if that's an acceptable answer to a quarter of submitted votes being rejected.

These are mistakes that are caught and resolved with in person voting.

I'm not in the camp that thinks mail in voting is impossible but these are real problems that need to be solved before November. For our country this is an unprecedented election, it deserves more respect than being explained away by partisan politics.
I disagree.

Not handling failures correctly is a time honored tradition in programming. It is so easy to miss.

For example, how often have you seen a malloc check for `ENOMEM`?

Even though that is something that could be semi common. Even though that's definitely something you might be able to handle. Instead, most code will simply blow chunks when that sort of condition happens. Is the person that wrote it "wrong"? That's debatable.

Some languages like Go make it even trickier to detect that someone forgot to handle an error condition. Nothing obvious in the code review (other than knowledge of the API in question) would get someone senior to catch those sorts of issues.

So the question is, HOW do you catch those problems?

The answer seems obvious to me, you simulate problems in integration tests. What happens when Service X simply disappears. What happens when a server restarts mid communication? Is everything handled or does this cause the apps to go into an non-recoverable mode?

This are all great infrastructure tests that can catch a lot of edge case problems that may have been missed in code reviews. Even better, that sort of infrastructure testing can be generalized and apply to many applications. Making rare events common in an environment makes it a lot easier to catch hard to notice bugs that everyone writes.

It's basically just Fuzz testing but for infrastructure. Fuzz testing has been shown to have a ton of value, infrastructure fuzzing seems like a natural valuable extension of that. Especially when high reliability and low maintenance is something everyone should want.
> Generating high-quality images without obtrusive artifacts is a much harder problem, and Photosynth didn't even try to solve it.

That's not really true, there are lots of ways to blend the points/pixels/images together from different viewpoints, including the illumination changing - this looks like more of a refinement in compression/volumetric representation instead of generating geometry and having view dependent textures or some other technique. You can see in the video that some things like the water shift as the view changes in a very soft way, and some things end up represented with more transparency. The results look good, but it might accurate to say that the article is way off in its claims instead of the paper, although the paper fails to mention photosynth as a citation as far as I could see.
An unfinished basement is still adequate for storing a freezer. Unless by "unfinished" you mean one without walls or a floor.
What Happens to Viral Particles on the Subway
Do any of these vulnerabilities let us unlock the bootloader?
Vote by mail works very well here in Oregon. Indeed, we only vote by mail. Here's our Republican secretary of state saying so:

https://www.myoregon.gov/2020/06/19/vote-by-mail-works-espec...
This is such a clever idea. I wonder if amazon are smart enough to actually do this.
There is a finite amount of space in which to store data.

Even if diversity of language is a principle that you adopt while creating this, not every single item in the database can be a Rosetta Stone-style snapshot of the state of human language in 2020.
Voter rolls should only contain US citizens.

Census is "actual Enumeration” of “all persons", so you'd need to join/filter the data to remove people who are not citizens. Doing so would cause some folks to be afraid/unwilling to fill out the census.

2020 census is especially difficult because they haven't done as much (any?) door-to-door canvassing that usually happens during a census.
http://archive.is/rrqTU
Its insane to me that Neilson/highly opinionated contrarians get any attention for this.
Browse https://arxiv.org for 30 seconds and tell me PDFs are "unfit for human consumption."

While its annoying to go to sites using PDFs that should clearly be a webpage, its obvious that PDF is good at solving some class of problems for certain people.
The scientific community for instance has been slowly moving towards formats that can generate both HTML + PDF, but for many reasons related to its legacy of print publication PDF is king.

To come in and just tell these people they're wrong is the height of obnoxious design hubris.
Between that and the boastful self-accolades, delivered in 3rd person no less, its hard for me to take this seriously.
What is a CRDT?

I would have appreciated a definition that didn't require me to go to a new site which pointed me at a paper.
Of course, and it's also completely unnecessary. We are innocent until proven guilty. If I show up at a polling place (or in this case, requesting or mailing a voting packet), show them some sort of identity and address, then I should be able to vote. If you're caught committing voter fraud, you should go to jail. It's simple, and has always been effective.
>2) 1/4 are "signature didn't match"

I've always felt that matching signatures was a terrible way of authenticating voters. The person doing the matching is not a trained handwriting expert. Also, like many people, I have subpar handwriting and I highly doubt my signature today looks anything like what it did when I first registered to vote 25+ years ago.
How are the records maintained in the US? In the UK every household gets a form every year on which they reconfirm who is eligible to vote at that address.
Do you ever re-visit your notes?

* If so, how?

* If not, what is their value?

Edit: I've returned and re-read that comment. It may come off as a little snarky, but it's not intended as such, it's a genuine question. I ask, because I'm interested in how other people's processes work, and wonder whether my system would be of use or value to anyone else.
I just got mine today in MA, and I didn't know what this was for, since I've never voted by mail.

Question: if I register to vote by mail, am I taking away the ability of this to be effective for someone else, i.e. using sacred resources or anything? I personally won't have a problem going to the polls on election day. Guess this is a long winded way of asking, is voting by Mail more/less reliable than going to the local station?
Yes, and if you listen to many of the people arguing against it the reason we don't have a national database of citizens is because the one thing stopping the US government from turning into Nazis and committing another genocide is poor record keeping.

EDIT: I am being hyperbolic here, but the second reply to my first comment was doing exactly this. We can't have this database because of the Nazis.
Honestly, the loss of the gym pool is the killer for me! I was on a 4-5 times a week doing 2500-3000 yards :/

I have the resistance bands but I loved the full body workout of swimming (and the rewards of mastering good swimming technique)
Originally one point was that you signed the back of your card and the merchant would compare the signature on your receipt to the signature on the card to verify your identity. Another point was so the merchant has proof you intended to pay them.

When I was living in the UK (which wisely uses a more sensible PIN system instead of signatures) I was shocked the first time someone asked to see the back of my card. I don't think it's ever happened to me in the US. Culturally we've collectively decided to ignore the whole "signature verification" thing, but when using your card abroad you sometimes are reminded that it's supposed to happen in theory.
Well, used to be. As I understand it newer laptops are more and more often using pouch style batteries to keep things thinner by using any available space.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24104862

This guy ran France's database for that when the Nazis invaded. They wanted a list of the Jews out of the database.

The problem with tracking all of us is trusting the next administration

Then again I prefer a more robust solution than hoping someone refuses to run a SELECT query.
Democrats believe that people without an ID will vote for then since these people are most likely living off government programs hence Democrats ought to be (though not guaranteed) their choice.

It is not malicious inasmuch they are pushing for it solely because they think they will benefit from this process. If it were the other way around they would oppose it.
All those companies are also supplying the NSA with anything they want to know
It's a very hard problem. I live next to a multi-family house in a college town and the tenants move in and out so frequently that I'm not even 100% sure who lives there... and I'm 10 feet away. Hell, I could probably only roughly estimate the total number of people that live there.

I wonder if there's a solution in there though... maybe landlords should have to report tenants on their federal taxes or something?
PDFs may be unfit, but I use them every day. So what if they look like web pages?
Rick and morty is the best
It's probably one of our top 5 or top 10 most requested features. All I can say is coming soon. Any way we can let you know when we release it?
Use 'verbatim'. It's a drop down option, and it isn't as good as the old + or other operators (deprecated because of Google Plus). For example, with verbatim you can't only + one single thing in a search.

Regardless, I basically just always search with verbatim on. Google is mostly useless otherwise.
Also, surge protectors wear out and should be replaced before they lose the ability to protect.

This will probably occur at a different time than when the UPS wears out, so it could be beneficial to keep them separate so you can replace the surge protector only.
How is that not a distinction without a difference when the ballot is in the envelope? So they look at the envelope to get your name and the ballot to see who you voted for. You would need some way to prevent these from being correlated by a person in possession of the thing you put in your mailbox.
Not this one either. I remember it had a square minimap at the bottom right corner that was about 1/3 of the screen height.
Can those that disagree with the above comment explain why?

Genuinely interested, as the comment seems to be accurate based on a handful of Google searches I just did.
> I honestly don't know how C++ programmers typically handle this situation.

The verbose one. A few extra lines rarely matters. I think the number of times this has come up in my code base is very very small, maybe a few dozen extra lines across hundreds of thousands.
and also please, answer this to help me decide where to release the game:

https://twitter.com/victorqribeiro/status/129293563727285452...
This is one thing I like about Germany, so you when you move you have to signed paper by the landlord that you're indeed living there. Then you take it to a government building and you "register." Every German is automatically registered and before a vote, maybe a month before hand will get a letter in the mail. They have to use this paper to vote or they can request a mail in ballot. You're assigned a place to vote(you have to go here). But they're always(from my experience really close to the place of residence.
Yeah it's silly but it's the only process we really have and it's the reason I'm not going to vote by mail this year. I have a reasonably consistent signature if I think about it but I'm not going to risk a random election official throwing it out because I'm younger and have a variable signature. That plus the screwballing that's happening at USPS right now I'm not going to rely on that.

There's 2 weeks to early vote for me so I'll just vote in that period.
My problem is rarely the diagnosis; it's almost always the prescription.

The right solution is to identify all of the sinks and sources (all of the events which allow a voter to be added to or removed from voter eligibility) and work to integrate automated systems in a web. Birth recordings, death recordings, change of residency (at DMV, credit bureaus, tax bodies, etc), change of citizenship, change of felon status, etc. Anything short of this will bias voting for or against "the other side".

I'm particularly frustrated by watching some states batch remove names from roles by using substring wildcards and also prevent same-day registration -- together these mean that people are unable to vote with no notice and insufficient time to restore their name to the roles.
There are many abuses for a national database less severe than genocide, and many "apocalypse scenarios" less likely than fascism in the US.
>However, I'm simply looking for a direct, factual claim that supports that these firings were directly intended to slow down mail delivery so as to cause problems during the forthcoming election. So far all the claims I've seen are indirect

You realize that this is an absolutely inane thing to ask right? The direct implication is that Trump is slowing down the USPS in order the guarantee his re-election - are you looking for a quote from Trump himself that he's doing this, because I doubt we will ever see one until it's too late.
IMHO lots of teachers have an absolute horrible understanding of relational databases and SQL. Myself included, until I started working at large financial institutions and read every book by Joe Celko I could lay my hands on.

E.g. using NATURAL JOINs covers about 1/3 of the use cases where students or apprentices are usually fiddling with INNER JOINs or joining relations using WHERE TableA.ID = TableB.ID, and it's syntax is much simpler.

With a well thought out schema, I personally find that NATURAL JOINs covers about 80% of my needs in that respect, and being unable to NATURAL JOIN tables is beginning to indicate well, not a "code smell" but what I would call a "schema smell".

I fully agree. Joining relations in a relational databases should absolutely be simple - and it absolutely can be:

SELECT col_x, col_y
FROM TableA
NATURAL JOIN TableB
Right: false positive from the perspective of catching fraud, false negative from the perspective of accepting good ballots, is what I mean, exactly. Same thing, different way of phrasing it.

Anyone know what the rejection rate for in-person paper ballots is, in the US, typically? It's hard to judge how much worse this is at successful voting than in-person with paper. My gut tells me increased participation would dwarf even a hard 10% rejection rate, assuming no improvement could be made, and if the in-person rejection rate's not near-zero then it's really a big win, but maybe not.

Meanwhile stories like this are making me really nervous about the public perception of November's vote, regardless how well they're actually run.
Ask HN: What's the name of the startup that sells hardware from failed startups?
Is there anything similar for general businesses in other areas besides the Bay Area?
How many places _don't_ require voter ID? Is the U.S. the only one?