skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Historically, when the President and at least one house of Congress are opposing parties, the federal government tends to be gridlocked except in time of national emergency (e.g., 9/11).

Unless you mean in the strict technical sense of national emergency, where the US has spent exactly 14 months not in one since March 9, 1933 (so the rule is moot because it basically never applies), historically that's mostly not true; it wasn't that true in the 1980s through 1992s with Democrats controlling one and sometimes two houses of Congress and Reagan-Bush presidencies. It wasn't very true in the mid-late 1990s with Clinton vs. Gingrich (there were shutdowns, but also major bipartisan initiatives like welfare reform).

Still, it's pretty true if you narrow it to a Democratic President and Mitch McConnell as Senate Majority leader, rather than trying to make it some nonpartisan broad historical phenomenon.
My prediction is that McConnell retires. Without a willing patsy to play against, there is not much to be gained by staying in office. He rammed a court nomination through, mission accomplished.
Who?

In six months time people will be denouncing photos where they appear with him as "fake news".
I'm glad for those Americans who suffered the nightmarish past 4 years. Finally, you're about to catch a break.
All you've said is that the "numbers" are kept separate, not that they haven't been reported in the official count.

You could very easily just show me where these two separate counts are being recorded on the PA SOS website but you cannot because it does not exist.

Why not just admit that you're wrong?
Eh, I was referring to the 'ending' part not being true.
SSDs are smaller, so you can pack more of them in the same volume. Not aware of really open designs (maybe in the OpenCompute project there are some), but just from a quick look at Supermicros homepage:

Something like https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/1U/1029/SSG-10... can fit 32 SSDs à 16 TB in a 1U system (Intel at some point announced 32 TB models in the same format, but I'm unsure if they ever were available).

This style can fit 48x 16TB in 2U: https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/2U/2028/SSG-20...

The trouble with such dense SSD capacity is more being able to interface them fast enough with the host and the outside world.
That's not realistic because the fate of the country would be decided by a handful of cities, all sharing a same culture.
There is no democracy on a privately owned platform. Trump can say what he wants, but Twitter absolutely has a choice what, if anything, they allow to be published on their platform.

FWIW, Trump's time on Twitter is winding down. The only reason he hasn't received the ban-hammer from Twitter is his unique position as an elected official. January 20th shortly after noon, he will no longer exist on Twitter.
if you're a data nerd, how can you NOT be shocked by so many results falling far outside the confidence interval (often multiple sigmas), and all in the same direction?
What's Trump got to do with it?

The question is whether or not you'd wish your 77 year old parent/grandparent to undertake 4 years of immense stress.

If your answer is yes I would, I'd like to know why and what factors you consider worth the risk of dying of stress related illness.

To be clear, this is not a job only select 70-year olds can do, this is a job many others want to do and I think if you ask any rational human being, a younger person would be better suited for.
Is it possible to very very slowly taper over a long period of time? Like take a 5 pct lower dose every week by scraping off some and using a scale?
Yes, Grover Cleveland.
I’m sorry but how do you reconcile your second paragraph’s criticism of the coexistence of two factual realities and your last paragraph in which you simply pick the one you happen to personally favor?
In thread you’ve pointed before there’s a link to postgraphie. Even without tweaks it already gives a decent code. With some little efforts you can optimize anything you want, score query complexity and etc. If you don’t want unpredicted performance, use persistent queries in production.

Nobody says backend work will magically disappear, but ignoring a generational improvement only because of job security concerns is insane.
Any illusion Trump was a master negotiator is blown away by listening to Bob Woodward's interviews. He almost incriminates himself, for free, over the phone apparently purely because he wants Woodward to write a better book this time.
There is also "what polls directly measure" and "what we infer from them".

Besides the usual adjustments for likely voter models, we also do things like infer how people will vote in House and Senate elections based on Presidential polling, because we do a lot more Presidential polling than down ballot, because money.

So one early thing that seems to have happened this year (and again, we are still early in the process to be making final verdicts in "what happened" retrospectives) is that people split their ballot more than anticipated, which means that the inferences we were making about down ballot races based on Presidential performance were off.

So not quite a polling error, but an example of uncertainty that may not have been correctly taken into account in forecasting.
Reminder: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

I don't see twitter mentioned.
The problem that has appeared again is that without a representative sample of information gathered, it doesn't matter how fancy your models are, you will not have accurate results. And quantifying how unrepresentative your sample is basically impossible to figure out in this situation.
> Slightly tangential, but my feeling is that most people don't know where the "the good, the bad, the ugly" expression comes from.

I hope you're wrong about most people not knowing about the movie.
You mean how it’s broken in two? Isn’t that better for ergonomics?
> Ah, Project Veritas, an organization whose founder has been convicted of fraud and who has a history of falsying and modifying evidence.

False on both counts.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
Great comment, agreed. The wonderful books from Nassim Taleb ‘Black Swan’ & ‘Fooled by Randomness’ touch on this in a way that forever changed my thinking.

‘We just can’t predict’.
Everytime I read a comment like this I think of that line from Dumb and Dumber:

“What are the chances of a guy like you and a girl like me... ending up together?”

“Not good”

“Not good like one in a hundred?”

“I'd say more like one in a million.”

“So you're you’re saying there's a chance!”

I know enough about probability distributions and modeling to know you can improve your models to lower that uncertainty.

And sorry, you are the Lloyd Christmas in this one.
Has there been discussion of Twitter/Facebook using different techniques like tweet delays (quadratic backoff?)?
Twitter didn't block that post for that reason. Also it wasn't on Trump's account, it was the NY Post which is, as you say, a tabloid.

As you can see here, he posted about it and there is no warning label:

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/13178254844958801...
There will be three, no, four living ex-presidents younger than the current president, Biden (77).

Barak Obama (59)
Bill Clinton (74)
George W. Bush (74)
edit: Donald Trump (74)
> I keep hearing Trump is the first president who started no new wars.

Don't believe everything you hear. This is false.

> He also supposedly brokered numerous peace deals

Like what?

> and had 4 Nobel Peace Prize nominations.

As others have noted, this means nothing.

> Is there a lot of violence I'm missing that warrants calling him "violent and authoritarian"?

The violence is largely hypothetical, and would, if it materialized, probably be perpetrated by white-supremacist militias rather than the U.S. military. But that Trump is authoritarian there can be no reasonable doubt. He has a long record of using his power to fire anyone who speaks against him, to harass anyone who speaks against him who he does not have the power to fire, and to protect and grant favors to anyone who supports him politically, even if they have been convicted of crimes. That kind of behavior is the textbook definition of authoritarian.
Statistics can be pretty unintuitive. On top of that, most people have never learned any statistics.
I think for the general public "debt" has negative connotations. It's something that they feel must be repaid later. It definitely can be a financial tool and can be neutral, but I don't think most people think of it that way.
Citation needed. A term like power structures is just lazy thinking.
Grover Cleveland won the popular vote 3 times in a row but lost the Electoral Vote in the middle.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Cleveland
That's not how human medical research works though. Single-blinded studies blind the patient. Double-blinded studies blind the patient as well as the researcher applying the treatment.

If you make a trial for a new migraine pill, you want to know whether it actually works or whether the mere act of taking something and believing in it is what works. So you give half the patients the medicine and half the patients just sugar. They can't tell, so the mere act of taking a pill won't make a difference. If you also can't tell (double blind) then they can't (not even subconsciously) deduce from your actions whether they just the control group. If you would not give the control group a sugar pill, they could be stressed out about not getting treatment and just that fact would distort your result.

For the most part, animal research works similarly, btw.
Whats even more frustrating is recognizing the population difference in day of voters and mail in votes, expecting a "blue shift" as votes are counted, and then watching pundits chime in on Tuesday about surprising results.

As far as I can tell the most surprising result was Trump's popularity among Cuban Floridians.
Sure, the model had value precisely because it said that even if Trump did better than the polls suggested, he would likely still lose due to the paths of victory Biden had. That said, the polls have shown, in many cases, poor predictive behavior of actual votes, and as such, we should not just brush this off by quoting the distribution of outcomes.
Another thing that complicated this was that the way you punched the ballot resulted in the chad going into a waste bin. Those waste bins would fill up to the point where it would physically prevent you from being able to punch out your chad.

That election and SCOTUS ruling was a mess, and as a consequence did a lot of damage to this countries institutions.
If you dig into the the margins they aren't looking very good, even if they got a fair number of eventual winners correct.

Predicted vs Actual (FiveThirtyEight's averages vs NYTimes' current tally; Biden's margin is positive)

PA: +4.7% vs +.5% (-4.2%)

FL: +2.5 vs -3.4 (-5.9)

TX: -1.5 vs -5.9 (-4.4)

OH: -0.6 vs -8.1 (-7.5)

PA: +4.7 vs +0.5 (-4.2)

IA: -1.5 vs -8.2 (-6.7)

NC: +1.7 vs -1.4 (-3.1)

WI: +8.3 vs +0.6 (-7.7)

GA: +0.9 vs +0.1 (-.8)

MI: +8.0 vs +2.6 (-5.4)

AZ: +2.6 vs +0.6 (-2.0)

NV: +6.2 vs +2.0 (-4.2)

They pretty consistently overpredicted Biden's margin by about 4-7% in almost all of the swing states. Even if that's within, or close to, the margin of error; there's a systemic issue if it's happening in almost every state.

Edit: Added AZ and NV; and the difference
The polls showed that Biden would win Florida by 2.2%, and in fact he lost by 3.3%. Is 5% within the normal error margin?

There is no reason that polls would be significantly different from the final vote results in most circumstances, if they are competently run.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/florida/
Hate speech is absolutely not subjective. And further, the counterexamples you gave don't really support your argument.

There's no moral high ground to claim when the opposition has repeatedly said things disparaging minorities and more recently repeatedly posted false information with the express purpose of inciting a reaction from your their supporters.

I'm not a straight white male so when/if the pendulum ever swings back in favor of evangelical christian 'morality' I would expect the exact same amount of favors I have always been afforded. I'm sure you could go on, but I don't think you have much of a point.
but you can use it to escalate executive powers beyond reasonable limits, like many governors did or like the previous two administrations did for the war on terror.
Maybe I'm wrong here but if a there were a new Russian President of Queen or England I'd want to be informed, as we all have to interact with each other.

But again, maybe I'm wrong and it's just me. I never flag and can't downvote so maybe the people that do are correct.

edit- spelling.
Yeah. The laws of the land largely assume the president is fundamentally a good actor with the nation's best interests at heart, which I think was sometimes the case with Trump and sometimes not.

We should require a fuller disclosure of a candidate's finances before we allow them to serve. Trump may be deeply in debt to foreign powers. He may not be. We do not know. That is a problem, and it should not be a partisan issue. It is mind-blowing that anybody is okay with not knowing. Let's not let that happen again. That should be the easiest law/amendment to pass, ever. (Of course it won't be)

We obviously have legal machinery in place to remove a president if the need arises, but it is necessarily slow and ineffective.

His term also (further) exposed big flaws in the way we put people on the Supreme Court. We should go back to the old system of a 2/3 majority required. No more 50/50 simple majority, as the Democrats instituted a while back. I find that a disaster.

The old 2/3 majority generally ensured that people who were competent centrists got onto the court. Both parties were equally happy with the candidates... or at least equally unhappy!
That's because he's not a master manipulator: he is aggressive and lucky.

His actions were aggressive: just not against covid. He sought to shift blame onto local governments and claim glory for himself.

This is an example of what a "career politician" would've easily used to their advantage, and handled well.
A lot of people have this image of that there exists these perfect villainous masterminds who always know the truth and always say exactly what benefits them, but in the pragmatic universe of real people and limited intelligence, always knowing exactly what to say somehow comes at the expense of always knowing what's actually happening.
He was chaotic and ineffectual and mostly focused on dumb peeves. But I do think he got some good ideas through the conventional “wisdom”. His execution on everything was poor.

Good new ideas:

Focus on China as an existential threat to US hegemony.

Just freaking get out of the Middle East already.

Globalization has not been good for the working and middle class.
Interesting fact: Trump could be elected president in 2024. I don’t think he will be gone for too long.

EDIT: I am no Trump fan. I just think the fact that he could be president in 2024 is interesting.
Perhaps we're using "blue wave" differently. To me, a "blue wave" would be Biden scraping a win on election night and then solidifying it into a 338+ blowout, not "Trump wins on election night and then loses as mail-in votes are counted". Having a 50-50 Senate at best isn't exactly a "blue wave" either. (Which is what happens if the Republicans win NC and AK, but lose both the Georgia Senate seat runoffs)
Thanks, I'm trying it out now.
We should trust but verify the results. The basis of facts should be settled in the following:

1. Select all ballots that were sent to the same address - or sent to the same Post Office (grouping all PO Boxes by post office).
^ Here you are trying to see if there is systemic voting behaviors out of the ordinary -- i.e. did 10+ ballots go to one address.

2. Select all ballots that were sent to an alternate address than the voter registration.
^ This is a general query -- select a sample set of these and confirm with the registered voter that they did indeed receive a mail in ballot.

3. If above is inconclusive, select all registered voters that requested a mail in ballot against the 2017-2018 Equifax Data to determine if correlations occur.

4. Select all ballots that were the voter did not vote in the last X elections (there are political consultancies that provide information on who NOT to waste your time on because they do not vote), did these people request a mail in ballot? Were these ballots sent to an alternate address?

For clarification [1], if one were armed with a SSN or DL and a previous address, one could request a ballot on behalf of another person AND have that ballot redirected to a location of their choosing... including a PO Box. The form is included here for reference.

[1] https://www.votespa.com/Register-to-Vote/Documents/PADOS_Mai...

EDIT: just so you know, I think both of them did things like this. I want my d%mn democracy back.
Gang violence is prosecuted, if the perpetrator can be identified. Gangs and people in gang-plagued neighborhoods are very reticent to name names, in fear of retaliation.

Every police shooting is investigated. They are often found to be justified, sometimes not. There's room for argument about the impartiality of these investigations, especially historically.

The fact remains that dozens of blacks are murdered every week in the USA, while black deaths in the hands of the police are comparatively very rare.

I completely agree that police should be held to a higher standard. But I don't understand the complete silence and active suppression of debate over the bigger problem.
The past four years and this election has exposed some deep problems within American Society.

If about 47% of your country was happy to kill democracy and reward immoral behaviour just to retain power, often justified by religious beliefs...

And Trump is not gone yet... Who knows what the Republicans will do with the stacked Supreme Court...
Bad poker players do this a lot. You bully and bully and bully, everyone folds, and your stack grows. You win little pots because the opponents don't like the risk. You win bigger pots because they think they have a chance, but you throw lots of chips in and act confident. Eventually some situation comes along where you've run up the pot, but there's no way people will fold.

Covid probably looked like just another thing to him in the early days.
That is a great analogy. I hope lawmakers patch all those holes, because you are right.
The same can be said of Trump--he's 74 and obese, which I would say puts him and Biden at least around the same level of health. It would be re-assuring to have younger candidates, but you can't claim this is an issue for one candidate but not his heavy, three-years-junior opponent.

At the end of the day as long as the president has the ability to choose competent advisors / cabinet member I think they'll be successful, and I definitely have more confidence in Biden's ability to do this.
There's also this https://www.trumpaccountability.net/.

Plus this Washington Post writer who is keeping a list of Trump supporters to keep them from being able to participate in society, hold public office, faculty positions, or be on company boards.

https://twitter.com/JRubinBlogger/status/1324792225260253184
The electoral danger wasn't COVID -- sicknesses and pandemics haven't decided elections in the past, I doubt they do now -- the #1 danger to any incumbent is economic depression: Carter, HW Bush.

I think Trump was very aware of that fact, whether or not he responded in the right way.
He claimed to be able to shoot someone on 5th Avenue and still get elected. OTOH, Covid could have been his 9-11 moment, with just a teensy bit of effort the resident of the Oval Office could come out a hero, just don’t screw it up.

OTOOH someone in that circle, who did have a 9-11 moment and didn’t screw it up, waited until years later to piss away their credibility. So perhaps the president got some really bad advice.
Clinton was a pragmatist; he shifted to a more moderate position after 1994 and the huge GOP sweep of the House. Thus he and Gingrich were able to work together and get some great work done.
Unfortunately you cannot just wish away the cause-effect here. Did Democrats piss away a hundred million in South Carolina on a race Jamie Harrison was never going to win, or did Jamie Harrison get within striking distance because of that money and was the investment in party infrastructure and training of lower-level party coordinators going to pay off over the next decade? Texas did not turn blue, but the effort spent on Beto's race and now on MJ Hagar may build down-ticket strength and knowledgeable people who may end up turning the state in a few more cycles.

When I grew up California and Virginia were red states, and I am sure people then also said money spent there was not going to move the needle and was a waste. When you have a billion+ to spend on races sometimes a little hope now pays off in a decade or two even if you lose this race.
What surprises me is how politicised American teenagers have become nowadays. I'm a (European) Millenial, and when I was 14 neither I nor my peers had any faith or interest in politics. Have a look on Reddit, where most of the population is US-based teenagers: in that place politics has infected every single discussion. /r/The_Donald was a bunch of angry teenagers.

Meh, I must have become a cynical grumpy old person: to me politics has always been a game for rich, old people.
Wanna bet you can do buffer overflows in Rust/Go too?
Good man must stress test the system. Thats goodwill.
The difference is that there is actually hard evidence and convictions supporting that, as opposed to the Trump campaign just making it up as they go along.

Very poor argument really, think about it.
I'm working on an (open-source) alternative to Google Analytics [0] and it's true, you cannot track users with perfect precision. It's technically not possible to archive, but you can fix some of the issues, like tracking on the backend to get around ad blockers or by setting up a CNAME record and serve the script from your own domain.

Anyway, even if tracking (or analytics, which is not the same!) isn't perfect, it's at least an indicator of how well you're doing. Which is better than having no data at all. Paying for ads that were "clicked" by bots or simply don't reach the target audience is a whole different story and the author is right, you will probably waste money.

[0] https://pirsch.io/
I grew up in a right wing province of Austria and saw that sort of wrong polling throughout my youth — which is why I wasn't surprised the slightest about things going as they did.

It boils down to: a fraction of the electorate will vote for $bigotcandidate but would never ever admit it to anyone outside the voting booth, because they know it is wrong. They will tell people they will vote for $notbigotcandidate, but vote for him nonetheless.

This fraction is not insignificant and you cannot easily represent it in polls without guessing the effect. In my home province it eas consistently around 10 to 15% over a decade.
I spend my entire day in tmux and vim land in a Linux terminal, but as a gamer wanting to play good games, it’s windows all the way. Gaming on Linux just still isn’t there yet.