skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
America didn't always have anonymous voting.
By "old people" I imagine he means less tech-savvy, not literally just people of an older age. The fact you're on HN means you aren't his target demographic :)
TeXnicCenter 2.0 Beta 1 released today
Our API lets you send individual friend list updates from your backend, and we're actually working on a web-hook based way of handling friend requests: if we need to verify that user A has permission to talk to a new user B we can POST to your web server and then update the friend list, or (if you use Parse) you can specify a Parse query and we'll look up the friends that way.
That sounds problematic, but it’s probably also important to note that absentee ballots always have prioritized the ability to vote over secrecy and being tamper proof. When it comes to absentee ballots I think that’s acceptable as long as they do not become the default of common way to vote.

Whether that, however, should also apply to electronic means of voting is questionable. Everyone understands papers and pencils. Computers are too much of a black box for me to ever feel comfortable with voting mediated by them.
No, I'm Developing A Product
This is a no brainer product to sell to the pizza joint. The sales pitch, You should start with your pizza delivery place and tell them, you will give them delivery access to the building exclusively for X dollars... "We Are The Only Pizza Place That You Don't Have to Open The Gate For." would be a very compelling USP, much like what built the massive brand dominoes pizza, "Fresh Hot Pizza in Thirty Minutes or Less."

You would be surprised how a simple small compelling USP can nearly monopolize a small market... Than I would branch out to other delivery services to your building... Once you have 3-5 places using this marketing pitch you can go to property owners and say, "Here is a way to squeeze extra revenue out of your property, while providing a great service to your tenants... You can take it a step further and offer the first part of the app (with a PIN) to tenants for free, sponsored by the local pizza delivery joint...

The best part is that you already have a relationship with the local pizza place, so start there... prove the model and slowly scale throughout your neighborhood, etc...
I've seen this shared quite a bit around the internet and I'm surprised how many people are surprised by this. The standard of living has, for the most part, continuously risen throughout the course of human history. And with the aid of technology, the rate of improvement is increasing as well. We have problems and it's great to acknowledge them, but personally I have a deep faith in the ability of humans to make things better for themselves. Most of the people I hear complaining about how humans are messing everything up would consider the circumstances under which even rich people lived just 100 years ago to be entirely beneath them.

Regarding the food, water and energy comments, I don't see how that is a problem. Our planet is covered by 70% water and the sun (directly or indirectly) provides enough energy for our food to grow and machines to run.

I wonder if humans are predisposed towards pessimism. Is there some advantage to selectively seeing only the things that aren't going well? From what I hear every generation thought that things were going badly and everything was better in the past. If that was really the case, when would all the improvement have happened?
I had a similar idea about storing data in slashdot comments as a "free S3" service (probably inspired by seeing other comments with random-looking garbage) but never got around to implement it.

(Partly inspired by an idea about using SMTP bounce mails as a temporary storage system, which I first saw in the book Silence On The Wire)
I see what you're saying but even with a summary, it's still a lot of area to slide down on the page. I have a hard time implementing that without it making the page feel cluttered.
"So I made three visits to Moscow, to Russia to look at buying a a Russian launch. [...] we actually did get to a deal. But there were so many complications associated with the deal that I wasn't comfortable with the risk associated with it."

"So I put together a feasibility study which consisted of engineers that have been involved with all major launch vehicle developments over the last three decades. We iterated over a number of Saturdays beginning of last year to figure out what would be the smartest way to approach this problem of not just launch cost but also launch reliability. And we came up with a default design."

Elon Musk, Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture, 2003. http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=381

I'm not saying he doesn't take risks though. He more than likely could have settled down in 1999.
Hahah nice. I built that same thing about a year ago with the Twilio API. It took about an hour. I still use it 2 apartments later. Awesome.
Growing Up With Nell: A Narrative Interface for Literacy
I think Paul's point was that typical election coverage is about the campaigns themselves, as if the campaign was intrinsically important [1]. But the campaign is not what's relevant to a voter. That is, they don't need a narrative about how the campaign is doing, they need information on their choices.

[1] Insider campaign coverage is certainly interesting, but that's different from being important. I'm interested in behind-the-scenes narratives in just about everything.
I'm guessing most of Engadget's traffic comes from the US where unsubsidized/unlocked phones are not popular at all. That should explain it. No need for conspiracy theories.
> pyramid scheme that disproportionally rewards early participants and relies on new entrants

Only the miner who discovers new bitcoins gets "rewarded" by the system; every other person who receives the bitcoins later gets them in exactly the same ways that other people get currency -- by participating in economic transactions. So no, it doesn't rely on new entrants for anything; if people stopped joining tomorrow, or if people stopped mining tomorrow, current participants would still be able to trade with each other and get value out of it.

The system is designed so that coins are minted at a steady rate. There is some additional reward for early adopters in terms of less power required per coin for mining. But there is also risk for early adopters: If you're a miner you have to buy real equipment and electricity which costs real dollars today, without a guarantee that you'll be able to liquidate the Bitcoins it produces to recoup your investment (which may take years). A healthy market should have a reward premium built into the success payoff of a risky investment.
Indeed. Link to a site that details the 85th-percentile speed limit in a logical fashion:
http://www.safespeed.org.uk/speedlimits.html

(Disclaimer: The site links to a study done in British Columbia, Canada and I'm from British Columbia, Canada :)).
ditto. I should just open source my github repo now anyway...
This is great advice but it also brings up a point; why do these systems require a local number in order to operate? It seems that a firmware upgrade could possibly decimate the op's business.

Edit: I want to point out that I am in no way, shape, or form saying that the op could not make a decent amount of money on this(though, 10/month is a touch steep for someone living in an apartment) but I was just curious why the manufacturers of such devices limit them in such a way.
At least now they probably have enough space.
And if the media never covers the fact those are valid (and much liked) options in other countries, all you get is confirmation bias, and a continuation of the (broken) status quo.
He doesn't need a better domain name...

- Amazon is a fun name but it conveys no information how about buystuffonline.com

- eBay is a fun name but it conveys no information how about OnlineAuctionHouse.com

- Square is a fun name but it conveys no information how about chargecreditcardsonyoursmartphone.com

etc.
Regarding Christie, I'm willing to assume that his praise on Obama is genuine, and not calculated. Christie has had to deal with an enormous disaster, and I can easily see him being grateful if the President has, in fact, been very helpful.
Software without hardware is just an idea. Like a brick, it alone is useless as it cannot be applied to anything, or used. Hardware and software need each other in order to function.
Three Steps for Ubuntu's Success
That doesn't sound much less secure than how I voted, as an expat.

I did the following:

1) Applied for a ballot by email, using a scanned Federal Post Card Application (FPCA) sent to the county clerk of the county I last resided in.

2) A ballot was sent to me by post. This is just a big piece of paper with some stuff printed on it.

3) I check the boxes I want to vote for.

4) I mail back my ballot.

Overall it doesn't seem much harder to spoof the existing process, since there's no verification of who sent back the ballot. The only security is that there might be various codes (or bar-codes) on that paper ballot which you'd have to know something about to fake.
What security measures do hackers use
This is a trick Hemingway used when writing.

"The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day … you will never be stuck. Always stop while you are going good and don’t think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start."

I often create fun little mini-projects for myself to do and store them for later. I find that completing a small and fun project motivates me to work on whatever actual task I should be working on.
911: "Hello, state police, what's your emergency?"

Me: "I'd like to report a drunk driver on the Pike. They are driving in both lanes and nearly ran me off the road"

911: "Do you have a description of the vehicle?"

Me: "Crown Vic with state license plate # 9"

911: "Mmhm, we'll get right on that"

/me drives under posted speed limit the rest of the way home to avoid retribution.
Curious, is it Prismatic?
Does the Romney family now own your e-vote?
If there only were a venue large enough available in Berlin.
I love the idea and how this moves us forward. Instead of mailing an absentee ballot, you have identical authentication of e-mailing that ballot instead of placing it in the mail. Despite the complications for privacy, tracking and disenfranchisement, an ID system similar to Estonia's[1] with private-key cryptography would make online voting much more authentic than we currently use (most US districts do not require photo identification at the voting booth).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_ID_card
People can learn. It's not like they would never be able to use their computers again. They'd call their daughter and she'd be like "oh, click on that little arrow and click on 'yahoo'".

Yeah, if any major service that millions of people used every day disappeared, there would be a period of adjustment. But that's all... a period of adjustment.
The simple answer is incorporation is not a commodity; every company has different needs depending on their founder/investor structure - therefore it's not something you can (or would want) to automate easily.

The more drawn out answer is the older legal mistakes get, the more expensive, frustrating and dangerous they become to fix. A simple mistake in your articles of incorporation can cause serious pain down the road, even potentially derailing your company all together.

Therefore for most "serious" entrepreneurs, it's much cheaper in the long term to just get incorporation done right from the get go. So is it really worth it to take that risk to save $1000?

All that being said - I'm not a lawyer - but I've been told by my lawyer that if you're a sole entrepreneur without any partners or investors, the legal side of incorporation is pretty straightforward, and you could probably get away with using a discount automated service provider. Things get complex once you have partners, shareholder agreements, employee options, investors, and so fourth.
Engadget has really gone downhill recently, AOL screwed up bad and everyone left for The Verge. Just compare the quality of their Nexus coverage...
The effectiveness of these mind games tends to be fleeting.

Nike nailed it: Just do it.
Certs would be fantastic; in my view, they could actually improve the system, because ballots would become read-only, and with the right system in place it would be impossible to "lose" them.
I don't understand why this is getting down voted. Vowel dropping preserves much more information than truncating.
Computers change the scale of things. with that you would have to print out many forms on paper that was not normal copy paper with identifying barcodes on it and then mail each ballot back after signing the form and marking each form individually. With an electronic version a lot of that hassle is taken out of the equation.
Don't get me wrong; I don't mean to say it's not fantastic, just that the headline was misleading. My expectations for "Hey, we managed to move this stuff to compile time" is that it will be 1) more interesting theoretically, and 2) less interesting practically (at least in the short term). Either can be fantastic, and these expectations are sometimes violated besides, but I just wanted to give a heads up to others (at least, those that skim the HN comments first) or be corrected if my reading of it was wrong.
Total anonymity is one of those things a perfect voting system would provide, but in reality you have to pick a balance. In the real world, total anonymity is at odds with preventing fraud.

I believe our current system is somewhere in the middle, with moderate anonymity and moderate fraud protection.
BSD & linux.
On Rackspace Cloud you can't link to offensive content
No.

As soon as you have 4 points, these 4 points uniquely define a cubic. Even if those 4 points are "right next" to eachother.

If this is difficult to imagine, it is the same with a line. Wherever you place 2 points, they always uniquely define a single line.

Unless, of course, you place 2 points exactly on top of eachother.
I found while getting my computer engineering degree [graduated Dec/11] that [at least at my university - Dalhousie] EE students focus more on power systems and electronics while CE students do more programming and electronics:

CE's took more courses in C/C++, OOP, OS design/development, etc while EE's were taking courses on advanced electronic design, power systems, power distribution.

At my school if you want learn software and hardware development then CE is it, if you are interested in electricity/power and electronics then EE is what you want.
Did some searching on hnsearch, found this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3240050

This also seems to be related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2934973
I think the poInt is that, as a species, we are going in the right direction. Sure the developed world has hit a speed bump and most advanced countries have had a few quarters of recession, but China is doing fine and much of Africa is undergoing a sustained economic boom. There are major challenges, but nothing that can't be overcome. That's nOt an argument for complacency, it's an argument to rise to those challenges and overcome them.
Odd-Even Rationing for Gasoline Purchases in New Jersey
I like this. Living in America, I get bombarded with the Libertarian idea that one should focus on the self so much that I forget that there was a time when focusing on the progress of society was not heresy.
DragonFlyBSD 3.2.1 released, battles Linux for speed
Most of the courses are, at least currently, not the quality of those served by a good conventional institution. Moreover the multiple-choice and/or keep-trying grading format makes assessment, even self-assessment, challenging.
The fact that I just asked two people who work for the election commission and they confirmed for me that they know that I did vote (which makes obvious sense) but not who I voted for.

You identify yourself to one person that is checking the registry. That person is supervised by another person to make sure there is nothing strange going on there. If OK, you're given a ballot in a plastic holder. After marking ballot, you slide your paper ballot into the secured box by letting it drop out of the plastic container. This means nobody but you saw your choice and now it is mixed in with all of the others. Later, during a recount, they can see who indeed voted, but not who they voted for. They only get the numbers.
I get a bit of an ugly feeling about the way competition is working at the moment. On the surface it's all roses - glitzy features coming faster than we can count them, hardware obsoleted with far better options every 6 months, prices falling like crazy ...

But you look under the surface. Apple and Microsoft championing user's "privacy" - why? Because they want to attack the revenue base of Google. Don't compete with your competitor. Poison their environment until it is too toxic for them to survive and they leave.

Google releasing ultra cheap phones - why? Apple hugely dependent on enormous margins. Don't compete with them directly. Poison their environment by changing how people think about hardware. Make it a zero margin game and Apple goes away as simply a side effect.

I feel differently about these things on different days. On good days it seems like we're in a golden age of competition. On bad days it seems like we're witnessing a silent armageddon where all sides have abandoned our interests and have voted for mutual-annihilation. "If I can't win, I'm going to make sure you lose too" they are saying. I hope my good days are the ones that turn out to be correct.
Flying over Las Vegas - The philosophy behind High Design [pdf]
If I was paying rent, and now I had to pay more money to open the door, that would probably deter me from renting from this building. Almost like a protection racket... You might be a tenant, but cough up extra money to get into your apartment...
I would strongly discourage a landlord from trying something like this. This is not a typical upsell, if anything the tenant blames the landlord for the problem in the first place...
Pessimists are good at identifying threats, prepare for the worst and therefore are more likely to survive when the worst does eventualy happen.
I found your article interesting. A quantitative approach to health worked very well for me. I used loseit.com to track calories, macro-nutrients, and exercise. By sticking to calorie limits, eating less than 20 net grams of carbs a day, and running three times a week with Couch to 5K I have lost 90 pounds over the last 11 months. My BMI went from 38 to 24.8. I have tried to lose weight many times before, but a quantitative approach made everything much easier for me. The real test however is going to be not gaining it back. I have just accepted that counting calories is something I will have to do the rest of my life because I am completely clueless about nutrition without numbers. I think you are on the right track. Health is different for every person, and unless people objectively look at what works and doesn't work for them individually, they will have a very difficult time finding a healthy lifestyle.

Anyway, good luck with your experiment!
This sounds like confirmation bias to me, rather than real world use of both browsers. I use Firefox as my primary at home, and Chrome at work (web developer) and I find very little difference in performance in real world use between browsers.

As for frequent updates, Firefox is a little more noticeable because you see it checking your extensions, but they don't update any more frequently than Chrome. If anything, they still update less frequently.
You're right (and you should know!), my mistake. I knew it too, and just mistyped. I would edit the post above if I could.
Aye, that works well, but if you're learning to program sometimes getting a VM installed is more frustration than its worth.
Carrier Pigeon remains found with coded wartime message
The main difference between Dropbox and any "web only" hosting solution is that Dropbox replicates the file on all your machines that are sync'd with Dropbox. So the file is both in your hands and replicated in the 'cloud'.

So unless the government pulls their server just as you upload your encrypted file, and somehow your HDD simultaneously fail immediately after upload, Dropbox does not have the same vulnerability as Mega/Rapid/etc-Uploader if you're uploading encrypted files.
I had a similar issue at an apartment building. I just setup a new Google phone number (with a local area code) and had the number forward to my cell phone, and then to my wife's cell phone if I didn't pick up. So while I didn't have the cool PIN thing, I could let someone in if I was out since it forwarded to my cell phone. I only bring it up because I wouldn't pay for this solution when the free one (which is nearly if not as good) exists.
if someone believed cyanide "Tastes Great. Very Healthy. Just Drink it," they would be allowed to say that according to the position you are arguing for.

I don't know why you're claiming I argue that, because in my last post, I pre-emptively explained why I am not claiming that (because to do so would be fraudulent).

Let me reiterate.

The basic principle is: The only time force is acceptable, is in order to undo or prevent someone else's initiation of force or fraud.

You likely don't agree with that principle, but I think everyone ought to. That is what freedom actually consists of, and it's a necessary and sufficient condition for human flourishing.

How does that apply here? The government should not tell someone what they cannot (or must) say, excepting cases where that person is initiating force by what they're saying. Selling someone cianide would be such a case. Disputing whether someone copied someone else or not in a design is not such a case.
Why does the dry martian dust stick to the dry wheels? An electrostatic effect?
> The same type of anonymity can be provided by an automated program parsing emails that I can write in about an hour.

No, it cannot. The process of the polling place can be verified by everybody who turns up. The integrity of your centralized program cannot.
oh look another Linus Torvalds Google Plus link
Thats interesting. I've heard that pg has recommended using the YC legal documents. That statement would seem to contradict what you've said, no?
There's some overlap between the two tools. Race conditions often lead to memory errors of the type that ASan can detect. TSan/Helgrind are the way to go if you want to find races that happen to be benign most of the time, or lock ordering problems, or races that lead to non-memory problems.
Yes because it really costs $600 per phone to make a quality one.... so 600 billion would be the cost for 1 billion people to have quality phones.

These phones should be dropping to $150 already... but there isn't enough competition for that yet.
yep :) I'd suggest getting your linode with the distro you want, then going through one of these tutorials http://library.linode.com/lamp-guides. Also have a look at all the other docs on library.linode.com there really good and you can learn a lot.

Lastly, if you happen to decide to learn PHP instead of Ruby, I'd highly recommend starting out "the right way" with a framework like Symfony2 (http://symfony.com/) or Flow3 (http://flow.typo3.org/) that uses namespaces, good OOP techniques, ORM, and encourages / will teach good programming techniques. Also, have a look at composer (http://getcomposer.org/) - which is the modern PHP equivalent of Ruby Gems.
Vim-kickstart (not a Kickstarter), basically a bootstrap for VAM