skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's all about what kinds of questions get discussed and addressed during campaigns.

The point of the campaigning process is chiefly to elect new representation, but secondarily (and closely so) to debate and test competing theories on the primary problems of the time.

In the electoral college model, the concerns of the swing states get the most attention, for reasons which are far too numerous and obvious to go in to. This is unfair to people that don't live in the swing states.

In the popular model, it's a bit subtle. At first, you think "well everyone's vote counts equally so everyone's concerns get counted according to the proportion of the constituents with those concerns." But this is not correct when you get down to the details.

If you're a candidate, you have to spend your resources in the most efficient way possible. Politicians do this (spend resources) by paying for messaging, spending their time campaigning in person and with volunteers/staffers, and by adopting policy positions (this is a resource in the political landscape).

In the electoral college model, the best return on your time, money, and issue consideration is found in the swing states, because everywhere else you have basically zero probability of success, which cannot be balanced out by any weight that electoral votes afford.

In the popular model, the best return is to target the largest population possible. People get divvied up into geographical regions no matter what---be it by local news network, regional speaking venue, or major political issue---and it's to these regions that our votes then become divided. In the popular model, the only places worth considering are those places with the largest populations, that still stand a chance of being easy to target with a single message, TV ad, or speaking appearance. If you're in a rural town, a candidate coming to speak to you only gets to speak to you, not to the nearest million voters. But in a city, the candidate that comes to you does get an audience of a million or more. So in the popular model, candidates will only bother to work for the concerns of those who live in population centers.

You get skewed either way. Personally, I think skewing toward regions with lots of people, even if they may not be the overall majority, is the best thing to do, but that's just my opinion, I don't have an optimal solution.

The problem is that "optimal" means that everyone's concerns get addressed in an equal manner, not necessarily that everyone gets an equivalent vote. The game theory involved is subtle and the emotions on all sides even more so.
I guess I just have two comments:

1. The brand page more or less straight up endorses using the mark, in so much as it describes how to do it properly with attribution of ownership of the mark to Google. Unless you think I'm misinterpreting the implication of this page? http://developer.android.com/distribute/googleplay/promote/b... Full disclosure, I'm no trademark law expert or enthusiast.

2. That article above, while I missed the first time around is from a truly desperately atrocious source that missed the important facts surrounding the Alibaba case, but to be fair, so did reddit and HN. Everyone saw the shit show the first day as the "Android is Closed!!!11111" allegations flew, only to find out that Alibaba was ripping apps off the Android Market and putting them in a co-branded rip off app store...
I am 35. Tried numerous but just can't grasp programming.  Is it too late now?
He is a well known troll. Don't feed him. But thanks for clarifying anyway.
There is one missing item in this analysis: Outlook and other email clients that let you push the down arrow to see the next email and continue on.

I think open-rate is a terrible and meaningless metric unless there is a filter specifying @yahoo, @gmail, and other email clients that force you to explicitly open the emails. Even with this metric added in, there is still phone email clients and email settings where delete automatically sends the person to the next email.

Even after filtering the data open-rate is still pretty meaningless compared to conversion. Conversion is very easy number to measure, but extremely difficult to increase. I'd rather have a 10% open-rate with 25% conversion than 50% open-rate with 1% conversion. A high conversion-rate allows the company to discover their customers and their behavior. Increasing conversion is an art-form. Increasing open-rate is difficult as well, but it should be secondary to increasing conversion.
but you cant focus on the field to type. You have to use those clunky buttons on the bottom and then hit the mystery button.

But that's not the biggest issue. Say the UI wasn't as faulty. What's the point? Why not just give a link to the file? Or create another url shortner... bhg.twlbox.com is loads easier than this process.
Congrats on your first game. This is awesome work for an 14 year old. I have downloaded and played this game for some time. I feel movement needs to be little faster.
Zero-Fill on Demand - All new pages map to a single zero "frame" in physical memory. In this case, you don't get any memory until you write to the page, at which time the OS steps in and allocates you a page of all zeros

EDIT: this means if the kernel can't allocate more memory when you write then the kernel has a decision to make; kill you, or kill someone else to get more memory.
Nope, its doing a half spin left, then a half spin right, never turning its back on you. Who would blame it?
So you're saying that even the election system artificially subsidizes sprawl in this country?
Maybe not, make sure to try different ways of getting into programming if the simple command line stuff isn't working for you. Maybe try something like codepen.io and just get a basic start and dig into javascript that interacts with the page.
Facebook's Mandatory Privacy Tutorials for New Users
More than half the population lives in an urbanized area of > 200,000. This includes suburbs of larger cities but not rural areas or small cities.
So instead of your vote being lost in the mass of California or New York votes, it would just be lost in the much larger mass of national votes.

You'd still be in a winner-take-all situation with your vote, but on a national level rather than a state level.

I don't think this change would have the effect people imagine. At all.
Its never too late to start over again. and surely age should not be the defining factor... if you feel like doing it, just do it and make the most of it.
One day the UI won't be as faulty, and people will have a way to download things with a short code.
> House of Representatives

Considering every time you hear a story about politicians trying something insane, it seems to be about the House of Representatives, I think that is exactly why a tie sounds scary.
Maybe there can be two new things? I am VERY interested in robots but I don't think web is "done", not even close. We are not even 10% into the potential of the internet. Maybe not even 1%.

And IMO mobile doesn't need ad revenue because mobile has apps/micropayments (same thing).
Nobody in their right mind hits a key value store for each single key value (an RPC for each key value). You'd be limited by the network latency.

You batch your changes in the client and then you commit them to the server. When that commit succeeds your data is persisted; until such time any client application must consider the data uncommitted. This is not unlike a client application would deal with transactions to a relational database.
So the benchmark is completely valid here.

(Well, only that here we also have deferred log flush, which means the changes will take a second or two to actually make it to the file system, but that still demands the same aggregate throughput from the HBase. That is where this test is not fair).

Edit: Spelling
Choice of language is pretty much a matter of comfort when you're first learning. The question is, do you want to be using Ruby/Rails or PHP/Wordpress/Codeigniter/etc. If you're just learning, you're going to want to code in whatever language you choose.
Just for reference, you can create backends for websites in Clojure, Java, Python, Haskell, go, JavaScript(node.js), etc as well.

I'd say use Ruby/Rails if you want to create webapps and PHP/etc if you want to create Wordpress sites.
Someone more experienced than me in these languages can comment further.

Heroku.com supports Ruby and from using it with Clojure and node.js apps, I highly suggest this route even if you enjoy setting up your own servers.
You can also use providers like Amazon EC2/Joyent/Rackspace and set up your own box to be either a LAMP stack or Ruby/Rails.

There is a long list of Databases to choose from these days, including: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Riak, CouchDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, etc.

Truly the answer you're looking for is "Just start somewhere". The amount of tech you can choose between is dizzying and you'll eventually get to a point where you can make your own decisions if you just keep hacking.
Im sorry for my ignorance, but I dont understand how HN can have memory leaks. I learned Scheme in school and from what I remember memory is handled automatically (in the particular one we were studying I think it was via reference counting). Is Arc that different from Scheme or am I just completely unaware of how Lisp works behind the scenes?
Indeed, psychological investigations have found that entrepreneurs aren’t more risk-
tolerant than non-entrepreneurs. They just have an extraordinary ability to believe
in their own visions, so much so that they think what they’re embarking on isn’t
really that risky. They’re wrong, of course...

If you are determined (you keep trying) is it actually that risky? For example, if there's a 1 in 10 chance of success, and you try 10 times, it becomes a 65% chance (1-.9^10). Plus, of course, you will learn a tremendous amount from each attempt; gather more resources; ask others; change your approach; even modify your goal (perhaps to something more audacious).

I think what stops people is aversion to the unfamiliar (whereas some people like it), and the pain of each failure. People like Edison fail a thousand times, and keep going (even if you hate him, you have to admit that takes a certain courage).

After 3 rocket failures, Musk said something similar
http://www.wired.com/science/space/news/2008/08/musk_qa (at the end):

Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we're going to make it happen.
As God is my bloody witness, I'm hell-bent on making it work.

If you don't give up, success is inevitable.
Uber says Chicago is trying to drive its sedans out of the city
No. Age is irrelevant in this sense. Find something you enjoy and just keep hacking.
It is a practical problem. The presumption is that the unusual license makes the language's implementation less amenable to survival.

I can't justify a reason to absorb that much risk over the lifetime of maintaining programs written in the Shen language, running on the Shenlanguage.org implementation, which is presumed to be the best. The relatively new implementation is hard enough to swallow, but understandably completely necessary and unavoidable. Considering the typically interested audience of advanced static typing include staid system programmers looking for an edge in correctness in systems that take a long time to build and last a long time afterwards, that's a pretty weighty consideration. It is from this viewpoint I evaluate my dependencies.

So, sorry. I don't think my analysis -- which is something you seem to sneer at -- is without a justified dimension. To be fair, I sneer at the licensing in turn, so all is even.

Hopefully, the authors might understand why so many people may be so hesitant to invest in their platform, doing all the hard work of writing, debugging, and maintaining ports and libraries on such a foundation, as they seem so inclined to ask people to do. Even if the existing authors did all that themselves, proposal of new investment in the platform in organizations at arm's length from Lambda Associates would raise some eyebrows. I could see enormous organizations (like the US DoD or Boeing) being interested.

I'd compare Lambda Associates (the Shen author umbrella organization) as a less entrenched Adacore as things stand.

Given that I don't feel they solve their purported problem anyway (divergent language implementations are not so much a fragmenting force as multiple libraries with inadequate resources doing the same-ish thing, a problem virtually un-treatable by any policy or license) I'd really hope they'll one day see fit to just not be strange with respect to licensing, and change their mind. The observation of another poster -- that this may ironically increase fragmentation, because someone fascinated with the ideas in the language but not the bizarre license -- may be inclined to make something kind-of-not-quite-like Shen rather than contributing to the existing artifact.
It would not appear to, but in effect, it would make the entire election simply based on popular vote.

Therefore your vote is not lost, it simply becomes equal.

This is far better than your vote actually being lost in the mass of California votes, since you, living in California, would still have some impact on the national outcome. And candidates, looking for popular votes instead of electoral votes, would have much higher incentive to campaign to all people, not just those in states where votes carry "more weight."

In all ways, this is more equal and more fair. Every election is a winner-take-all situation—it might as well be a winner-take-all situation where your vote actually has an impact independent of your state.
You aren't kidding! I was skeptical about this, so I checked. Given the list of urban population areas from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_are... and a U.S. population estimate of ~312m, you run out of urban centers with >1m people (at #42, Salt Lake City) before even reaching half of the U.S. population (131,980,346)! To put this into some perspective, San Juan, Puerto Rico would be an attractive stop for an aspiring U.S. President (at 2.1m people), if they had the right to vote!

Suddenly, U.S. transportation & communications infrastructure problems make a lot more sense. I knew the U.S. was a big place, but I vastly underestimated how spread out our population was.
I'm a "optics" (actually photonics-crypto) PHD candidate that also can build a RS422 protocol converter. You had luck I wasn't in their team :)
> That being said, the app marketplaces are still heavily in favor of iOS.

No it's not. What apps are you missing?
And yet a friend of mine has to reinstall her shiny new netbook because apparently there is some nasty rootkit/trojan that cannot be removed (so easily).
That's not true. All four major browsers can run CLR code through Silverlight [1] and depending on the statistics you use, the installation base for the plugin is in the same ballpark as Java, somewhere between 65% and 75% [2]. StatOwl even has Silverlight slightly ahead of Java at 69.7% vs 70.0% [3].

Of course, these are desktop stats. On mobile, it's a different story.

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/getsilverlight/Get-Started/Install/...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight#Adoption

[3] http://riastats.com/

[4] http://www.statowl.com/custom_ria_market_penetration.php
I've got nothing whatsoever to do with this one -- it's a Shan + Mike joint.

But thanks for the kudos. We should have some fun stuff for y'all on Tuesday night...
Thanks for sharing that about CommentPress, what a great project.
Blog from a 'Grad aspiring to be a data scientist'
Totally agree. We should standardize on just one kind of cpu, gpu. That way we don't have to deal with any compat issues.
NO BUT [insert crude reduction of Nate's science down to the level of tv pundits]. I'd love to know more about Nate's model, but I trust it a hell of a lot more than the raw data of Gallup (seeing as Gallup's nearly the only one left giving him a chance. Dick back-peddaled today, Rasmussen did more or less too.)

Nate actually has a book about why this occurs and what it does to the conversation of politics in elections in the US.
I am on the wrong side of 30's. My background is Econ and I am working towards an MS in software. It is pretty hard but you can do it. Try codeacademy.com for simple tutorials. Youtube has lots of resources too. Once you still to a regime of learning, it is possible. Here is a link to my journey in grad school - http://datagrad.blogspot.com/. Hope it helps
PS -- Good luck
Posted here in 2009: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=511908

Also relevant: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3626694
What specific concrete difference do you see happening in that case? What does it mean to "campaign to all people"?
This is difficult to maintain for shared group experiences though. For example, I went on a group trip in 2004 to Europe with a group of strangers. I became friends with a few and interacted with many. Sure I could keep in touch via email or phone with the few, but what we really value about those 10 days was the shared group experience. A 20 person conference call seems much less viable than a Facebook group with the occasional reminiscing post. This starts with a friend request.

Of course this escalates quite quickly. Shared experiences as classmates or part of a student organization or even a workplace. We used to only have the option of maintaining individual relationships. Now that we have the option of maintaining group relationships, the definition of "friend" is fuzzy.
I love this and agree whole-heartedly. Bret clearly is on to something incredible in his visualization methodology, but I can only ever view it as complimentary. Combinatorial/simulation-based thinking is an incredible tool in my regular toolbelt, but having only it would be like walking with just one leg. Feasible with nice crutches, but unnecessarily challenging.
538 derives their probabilities by running simulated elections. http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/methodology/

Somewhat intuitively, the simulations themselves have concepts of "national movements", where a candidate can (with some probability) gain 1%, 2%, etc. across all states.

The state probabilities are then derived from how many simulations/total candidate A won. However, partly because these simulations actually had national movement effects, you'll find that odds of winning both Florida and Ohio (as in # simulations/total candidate A wins both states) are not the state odds multiplied (they odds actually should be higher).

That said, with the raw simulation data, the graphic could show probabilities for every combination.
Great work! Can't wait to try it :)
I use a factory for the same things you use them for: to build objects.

For example, I use factories to create test objects that are complicated to set up (using a gem named factory_girl, actually).

Also, in Ruby, every class is a factory for its own instances. If I define a class called User, I can assign the class object User to a variable:

factory = User

Then I can call

factory.new

and receive a new User instance.

As for DI, it's not wrong, nor is it unidiomatic. Plenty of folks in the community use it, and often.

A commenter elsewhere in this thread says that DI is unnecessary in Ruby because you can just reopen or redefine a class whenever you want. That's technically true, but isn't a good practice, as it can lead to some rather rapid foot shootery.

If you want to swap in different-behaving dependencies, DI is a straightforward choice. Reopening an existing class and mangling it can cause very confusing behavior, and is generally avoided by experienced Rubyists.
It's also pretty deceptive, as it gives each path equal visual weight when they aren't all equally likely
Thank you. You've got it right :)
I've seen people go to extreme lengths to avoid being a victim of overcommitted memory: http://www.baus.net/memory-management

Even after having the occasional run-in with the OOM killer and having to drive into work at 3am because sshd was among the casualties, I can't see thwarting the OS's virtual memory system like this.

Besides, if you're really that worried about uptime that falling victim to the OOM killer is an unacceptable risk, you should be preparing for surprise hardware failure too, which in my experience is much more likely to happen anyway and can be just as fatal to your "invincible" process.
"I deleted my Facebook account" is this decade's version of "I don't own a TV."
Thanks everyone for your comments. If I offended any of you, I'm terribly sorry. I do and don't mean to generalize. I've had some bad experiences and wanted to organize my thoughts. I do completely agree that a better post would have been more specific and even backed up with harder facts. Thanks for reading :)
Maybe they're not counting that electoral vote here. Can anyone tell? This diagram needs an electoral vote count.
I've never heard of this before but it's something I've dreamed of for a long time because of how fucking cool it is. Whole Earth Catalog catapulted into the 21st century..!
Just so as not to misinform: I did a quick edit before running out the door, and the bit I added about satire and parody, I got backwards. That should have read "parody (but not satire!)". I think it would show how very specific the idea is, but I don't want to spread misinformation. Just an FYI.
Congrats to the OP!

Of course, there's always the birth lottery for most people reminiscing here.
For people coming from the third world, this kind of a feat would be very rare to come by and won't be appreciated even if they do, as they are still tackling lower level problems. Heck, my parents don't even know I do on the computer. From where I come from, good grades are the best thing a kid could show to their parents.
The game theory is not complicated at all for a first-past-the-post election with two candidates: candidates will cater to the median voter. There's even a theorem proving it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_voter_theorem

"Skewing" a democratic political system towards regions with more people in them would be vastly, vastly preferable to our current system. A number of big warts in US policy can be explained, at least in part, by the biases and misincentives introduced by our election system.

Probably the most obvious is the federal government's support of corn ethanol: supposedly it's done in the name of energy independence, but in reality it's done because almost all US Senators believe that they're going to run for President one day, and none of them have to try to win an Iowa caucus with a vote against corn ethanol on their record.
It was considered but there are some equations that still need to be worked out. We'd need to store the history of each player but I believe we decided it could be done.
It's not so much that it subsidizes sprawl as much as it subsidizes low-population states. They aren't quite the same thing: Delaware is reasonably densely populated, but it benefits quite a bit from the electoral college.
Wow! That means so much! Thanks for that comment.
History and hopefully don't really factor into a thoughtful analysis of current security issues.
The Netherlands has a long history of being a hub of international trade, from spices and bulbs to diamonds and IP packets. Add to that its tolerant attitude towards pornography, prostitution and drugs - compared even to much of Western Europe - and it wouldn't be much of a surprise to see organized crime diversifying beyond things like porn hosting (which benefits from the IXP you mention) into malware and identity theft too.

(I have no data to back this up...)
Candidates currently essentially have no reason to pay any attention whatsoever to non-competitive states, but if the election were a popular vote, going from, say, 20% to 40% in a state would be a significant advantage.
Ignore people telling you to try javascript, python, C++, C, ruby, go, typescript, forth, java etc. Just do what millions of people have actually enjoyed doing: learn BASIC.

http://www.freebasic.net/
http://www.zetcode.com/gui/fbgtk/
http://www.petesqbsite.com/
http://www.dbfinteractive.com/forum/index.php?board=2.0