skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There have been problems like this in every election with these machines.

More troubling, exit polls and voting results have routinely disagreed with each other since 2000. In most countries that would be taken as proof that the election was not fair. But not in the USA!

http://www.ukprogressive.co.uk/breaking-retired-nsa-analyst-... claims evidence of systemic manipulation of the vote, with the trend strongly being in the GOP's favor. I have not personally verified, but it would not surprise me.

Anyone who has been paying attention this election cycle knows about the attempts by both sides to manipulate rules about who can vote, when, in ways that advantage themselves and disadvantage each other. That happens in a lot of elections but not to the extent of this one. With weird results such as, because of a recent law in Ohio, polling workers have to ASK for ID, but due to a court decision, they can't stop you from voting if you DON'T have that ID. (Confused polling workers are sure to get this wrong.)

The general trend is that Republicans want as many barriers to voting in person as possible, while Democrats want as many to be able to vote as possible. That is because more marginal voters are much more likely to be Democrat than the general population. The stated reason is "to prevent fraud" even though there is very little evidence of such fraud in practice. On mail-in ballots this reverses, since the GOP expects a large portion of mail-in ballots to be from military people who are likely to vote Republican. Fraud has been more of an issue with mail-in ballots, but obviously people are not as worried about that.

Laws get broken as well. For instance the 2000 election was decided in Florida, in part due to a voter purge that the courts decided was illegal. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Central_Voter_File for verification of that. The lesson learned is that voter purges work, which is why Florida was trying to do a purge this year at the last minute despite being warned that it was illegal. Because flipping the choice for President was easily worth the slap on the wrist they got afterwards.

There already have been laws broken this year (see http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57535950/man-charged-aft... and http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/national/fbi-launches-... for example), and everyone expects the lawyers to be gainfully employed as a result.

In short, get out your popcorn. When we exercise our right to vote, the vested interests exercise what they see as their right to manipulate the vote, and this time there is a decent chance of fireworks.
Is this a review of microsoft's hardware? Because there were all those really good reviews of windows 8 on touchscreen laptops last week, right?
Confirmed: Microsoft To Kill Windows Live Messenger in 2013
This. There have been similar reports of those trying to select Obama.
There's an interesting line of thought that a fragmented and diverse set of technologies and policies is more robust than a consolidated 'council'. You might be able to mess up any given district - but if you corrupt the council then you straight up win.

This makes a bit less sense when you look at how it ends up that a very few districts end up deciding the race - but I think the idea itself is sound. Those battlegrounds will shift, likely more rapidly than endemic corruption can take hold.
I am a red-blooded technologist, but I think voting should be done on paper ballots. Call me a luddite, but it's just too easy to manipulate votes--either at the time of voting or in post-processing--with an electronic voting machine.

That being said, the only conceivable way to have a secure electronic voting process is to use a completely open source system. Open source hardware and software, with publicly viewable results.
I've used this machine in another state, and it absolutely generates a paper trail. There is a rolling receipt going on the left-hand side of the machine behind glass that records every single button press you do, and scrolls out of view when you complete voting so the next guy can't see it.

It's not perfect, and not my preferred system, but it's pretty decent.
I think it's assumed in the Glacier use-case at hand that the data is not time-critical. The continued-existence of 1TB of old photos is important, not immediate access to it after my house burns down.

The backup time and storage for my use-case is mostly one-off. I don't have a need to rsync a folder containing photos from 2008 because I will not be making critical updates to that folder.
I never understand the population argument. Counting votes is perfectly scalable, if one in a thousand people volunteers to count votes it doesn't matter if your population is 1000 or one billion.

In Germany voting machines have been banned completely with good reasons, because they're unsafe and easy to to hack. And still we can pull off a purely paper-based votes with 82 million people completely without any lines in front of the voting booths and results within two hours after the election.
what is this fantastic place?
I've been using the instarepl to learn clojure and I'm liking it a lot so far for that purpose. However I still can't grasp how to use the project features. I'd like to humbly suggest you do some hallway usability testing and work on the learnability of the UI.
I use this one:

http://esa.heavens-above.com/PassSummary.aspx?satid=25544...

with the latitude and longitude inserted in the obvious places.
I got really into playing pinball a few years ago, and I got into the habit of turning of a pinball machine whenever it wasn't working correctly (mis-aligned flippers, whatever) so that other people didn't waste their quarters. Yes, it was kind of obnoxious. Sorry.

Anyway, a similar mechanism to say "hey, this voting machine might be screwed up, somebody check it out ASAP!" would make a lot of sense.
Great point, here is a chart of the Russel 2000, incredible growth during that period.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=%5ERUT&t=5y&l=on&...
"Anyone who has been paying attention this election cycle knows about the attempts by both sides to manipulate rules about who can vote, when, in ways that advantage themselves and disadvantage each other."

Since when have Democrats been passing laws to prevent old white people from voting?
> Or that they don't happen...

Yah, somehow I doubt that, unless you managed to hire god to run your elections. Humans make mistakes, and machines and systems that humans build mess up.

If you never hear about problems that's quite worrying - that means no one is even checking.
Totally with you - especially because Wikipedia's math pages go from zero to high math pretty fast, and even something simple like this would make these subjects more accessible - even intuitive.

There are enough web-based animation stuff to make this trivial - I wonder why no one is doing this kind of thing? There are these REALLY old pages with Java applets or even JS craziness from the 90's going on - but we have tools to make this sooooo much better.

We need an online science museum methinks.
Google Tests New Navigation: Lots Of Whitespace, No Sidebar Ads
site: only returns with links that are in this subdomain. DDG searches all the links that have been posted in HN. I think this is a big difference.
Even if this is just accidental or some weird calibration issue (weird, because it only seems to affect one button according to the report), it just goes to show how little confidence one can have in these machines. Does anyone think if they can't get the touchscreen right, the remaining parts of the system can be expected to work correctly?

The only positive thing is that such an easy to demonstrate failure might open the eyes of the less technically educated parts of the public to how bad an idea it is to use electronic voting machines.

Any suggested replacement of paper ballots comes with such a huge bag of problems (sometimes inherent in the method, and not merely problems of the implementation), and so few advantages that it puzzles me why anyone would want to introduce them.
exit polls and voting results have routinely disagreed with each other since 2000. In most countries that would be taken as proof that the election was not fair

It's absolutely not proof. It's, at the least, evidence. Exit polls are statistical -- in my dozens of times voting, I've never hit an exit pollster.

But if you say "the exit polls disagree with the official numbers, so let's go with the exit polls" you have substituted your official election mechanism with the exit polls.
The republicans are the party of liars. Who is more likely to actually commit these crimes? Republicans. Even the 4 votes thing you came up with is probably republicans spreading lies.
Class based views have really helped me get rid of ugly, complex, and deeply nested form handling views. I recommend looking at the source for the form wizard views mentioned in the article as well as all the views and mixins in django.views.generic.edit. As the article mentions, their features aren't always completely documented, but the code is very easy to follow.
I can't fathom why would you even choose touchscreens for voting machines. It's a simple interface, mechanical buttons are much better. They are more durable, offer tactile feedback and can be used by people with visual impairment.
Google Chrome: Longer battery life and easier website permissions
To carry on ismarc's thought, patents were only ever meant as a time-limited monopoly, to encourage and reward innovation.

Patents and copyright have grown to become much more defense structures and "keep out" signs, which I think unfortunate, but the basic premise is sound.
Yes, in SQL and filesystems, such security relies on permissions at a lower level than your shell/REPL.

(BTW, this post is written using Light Table, rather than the usual emacs. Nice feel! :)
They could be side projects at work! It's kind of weird, but I have my main work at work, and then I have a small stable of things that I work on when I'm not behind on my regular stuff and want to do something else.
I hope it is a hoax or a miscalculation issue. If it is actual fraud, I hope the people behind it are found, tried and if convicted punished to a degree warranted by what this would be -- treason.
In my final month I lost $600. I didn't include this on the chart to keep things simpler visually. Since then I have not traded and the reason is that it was abundantly clear that my program was no longer working. That's why I shut it off.

With regard to tuning I may have lost $1000 or so but as I wrote in the article I was able to build a backtesting model that accurately simulated live trading. So once I had that I could basically use it to verify I had sufficient edge to make a profit after covering my commissions.

My risk exposure was very low. When I said large losing positions this meant like $600. But the bottom line is I had a daily stop loss of $3000 enforced at my broker. The most I ever lost was around $2000.

Anyway, there is not really some hidden thing that I am not telling people. It does bug me a bit that your comment is at the top given that it says I'm manipulating statistics and was actually one of the guys that the quants gleefully picked off. I think it's unlikely I traded much with other HFT systems but if I did they certainly lost money.
"Cannot reproduce. user error"
This happened earlier as well during the early voting period (though Romney votes were being switched for Obama -- funny how one got coverage whilst the other didn't).

It's not some conspiracy, just a calibration error.

Source: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/03/Electroni...
Try this: https://www.cloudflare.com/features-cdn

Edit: More specifically, try it from the Bluehost cPanel: https://my.bluehost.com/cgi/help/cloudflare
To really be able to do this with a lot of success, you need to be able to do intraday trades, which would make you a day trader under SEC rules, which also requires $25,000 in your brokerage account.
The iPad mini's glaring weakness
Is there any evidence that what it records actually matches the screen anyway?
> vote boxes(still vote on paper)

FWIW, most of the world votes on paper, and if history's anything to go by paper ballot is way more reliable than electronic, at least when it comes to auditability. I'm sure it's possible to design a secure and tamper-proof electronic voting system[0] with a great, useable interface... but nobody seems interested in doing that.

[0] system, not machine, because you most likely want the machine recording votes and the machine tallying them to be fully separate.
Google cache since Breitbart is getting hammered:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.b...
Is it real, and Republicans are fraudsters? Or is it a fake, and Democrats are fraudsters? Or is a Republican plant of a fake so that I believe I hate Democrats?!? Or maybe even Democrats planted an obvious fake, to make me think Republicans posted the fake, so that I'd know it's fake and end up disrespecting Republicans for the poor attempt at influencing me?!?!?!

Too confusing. I'm staying home.
In the US, the power to manage elections is still very much held at the state level. There have been federal inroads (Voting Rights Act) but historically the states have held full control over voting procedures. Most positions being voted on are state-level or lower (the only federal ones are President/VP, Senate, House) and all initiatives being voted on are state-level or lower. Also, the Constitution specifically gives power over choosing of Electors to the states. (Article II Section 1 "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors") so each state does things differently.
> Consider that every car has a gasoline tank, many houses have fuel oil

Just guessing that this could be a gating issue once you have something to deploy. People can be irrational, even when faced with facts. I know people that will not go into the water at the beach for fear of being attacked by a shark. Yet, the same people don't think twice about getting into their cars in the morning and driving on Los Angeles freeways.

Here industrial design might be the key. If the unit looks, almost literally, like the typical freezer or refrigerator lots of people have in their garage it might mitigate irrational first impressions.

Good luck! I'll keep an eye on developments.
Here's a 64bit one: http://temp2.kodowa.com.s3.amazonaws.com/playground/bins/Lig...
> Counting votes is perfectly scalable, if one in a thousand people volunteers to count votes it doesn't matter if your population is 1000 or one billion.

Unless you're trying to bribe the counters/interfere with the counting ;).
Harry Fox Agency Claims Copyright Over Public Domain Work By Johann Strauss
I'd prefer to keep a receipt for myself, with a randomly generated serial number on it, so at some point I could verify that the digital record of my vote #158FA134 matches the paper receipt and who I voted for.
Yeah, I'm (the author) a giant fan of CBVs in Django. Sadly, the form wizard views, although class-based and fairly sprawling, don't seem to be very friendly to experimentation. It seems to be a pretty locked-in workflow that's horribly undocumented. Hence the post.
If your plan to secure the machines is to have the source be open, you have already failed. You need a system that works well even if the source has been altered.

Paper ballots have issues, too. They are different issues, and largely unseen by the general public until you have a really close election and have to use human judgment to decide whether that mark counts as a vote or not.
Donning my tin foil hat for a minute here -- I think if I were to try and attempt to commit voter fraud through the machines, I'd make it this obvious intentionally so it seemed like a legitimate accident to those who noticed; "It's too obvious to be fraud"

It would probably cause a small dent and shift by people who don't notice or are confused (elderly).
Statistics tells you the odds that the exit poll would disagree by some degree with the actual result. If the odds show, for example, only a 1 in a 100 million chance of it happening, an investigation should take place. That you've never hit an exit pollster doesn't say much, because the odds can be computed with high confidence by polling only a tiny fraction of the voters.

Statistics is highly valuable despite not being proof. For example, it's a foregone conclusion that Obama will win today, based on earlier polls. It's not certain that he'll win, but the odds of him losing are nil, the stats show.
Built a business on Parse? You need Zenbox
Seems like this would result in many users using the same password for particular services.
1. Author graphed his daily returns which should give you a handle on his volatility. He also stated his max drawdown was $2k.

2. Author has stated elsewhere than he began with $10k in seed capital.

3. The "bullish" market you cite increased only about %70 in that timeframe while the author's returns were multiples of that number.

4. Author walked away from a _previously successful_ strategy that no longer produced profits. His montlhy returns went to nearly zero so he stopped.

Edited to fix numbers.
Ah, thanks for point that out! The only things you need to input are the service and passphrase--the result box is just for the output of the generator.

Now that you've pointed this out, I'm doubting my sanity in making the, um, output box an input... It should focus on the "service" input on page load, but on a tablet that might not be obvious.

Anyway, I should replace that to avoid confusion. Thanks for checking it out!
quite true. but HFT has become a buzzword like "the cloud" and even many financial industry specialists claim to do HFT but in fact they are just market making. auto-scalping or even hedge funds that day trade with robots are not HFT.

this: http://books.google.de/books?id=dobO95EBcqsC&redir_esc=y

even though its over 10 years old, is real HFT. moving correlations, windowed FFT (of bid and transaction events), microscopic operators, negative first-order autocorrelation of returns.

it is NOT about supplying liquidity or being a market maker. that's just market makers trying to say they are in on the latest trend.
Seriously? Why are you even here (HN)? This place does not suffer trolls lightly.
Rumored Google Wallet credit card may work with almost any Android phone
> (1) We have > 300 M people. That's a huge population.

It's hilarious when Americans use that as an excuse for things being sub-par in their country. I see it all the time for health care, roads, schools etc.

Yes, your country has lots of people in it, but it also takes in an enormous amount of tax, and has enormous government agencies to organize this kind of thing. Everything should scale up appropriately, but you guys have no figured that out yet.
>Altering is an action, not something passive.

I disagree. If this person decided to walk away because of confusion/frustration/etc, then it would've been one less vote cast and would have altered that individuals vote. It wasn't intentional, but a software/hardware bug.
Yeah - politicians who happen to agree with you must obviously not be lying.
People have every right to be harsh. Microsoft has tried for years to get tablets right, and they still haven't. I was just agreeing that the device is early; they should have waited a bit to release it. It has a lot going for it, but so did the HP TouchPad.
Microsoft should probably have made a clear divide between tablet and desktop OS. Windows RT tablets running only the interface formerly known as Metro, and simply an incremental upgrade to the much loved Windows 7 for desktops.

Mixing the interfaces gives a non-satisfactory and confusing experience on both desktop and tablet devices. An exception could be devices that are a bit more of a laptop/tablet hybrid than the Surface (i.e. the coming Surface Pro).

It seems MS might still be limited a bit by their big-corp shackles. The whole Windows RT / Windows 8 issue causes more confusion than anything else, and ultimately seems as a decision made by commitee, rather than the result of a single, focused individual or team.

But Microsoft is just at step 1. And with the size of their pockets, they will not give up the tablet race just because of a not-quite-as-hot-as-expected launch. They are in it for years to come, so it would be odd if we don't see a much better implementation over the coming 2-3 years.

Whether or not Apple or Google manages to innovate further in that time remains to be seen. But from the uninspiring, incremental upgrades coming out of Cupertino the last few product cycles, it could seem MS is being given the chance to catch up within the foreseeable future.

In any case, computing in the hybrid form of a tablet form factor with full OS and keyboard / trackpad is here to stay judging from the huge success of the Transformer series and the more limited but still substantial success of the Windows 7 slates. So we will surely see a lot of interesting products released from all camps over the next few years.
How naive of Brin to suggest this, and some might easily suggest that the best thing politicians can do is spednd their time sticking it to each other, that way they meddle less and avoid doing any real damage. Seriously though this post really shows how little Brin understands about how political systems work.
Be careful, your intelligence is showing.
How to make a simple Mac OS X app
s/country/republic/

Opinions on whether something should be handled at state vs federal seems to ebb and flow in great proportions in the US.
underdesign, you appear to have been hellbanned, your posts show as dead to me.

About the original question, I don't have enough experience working with designers to answer it :) (though I hope to start working with designers soon :) )
Well ... I live in a country without voting machines and we still manage to count all votes on the same day. There is no need for faulty machines, is there?
The fact that the current implementation is not reliable doesn't make the whole idea of electronic voting bad. We've had electronic voting for general elections in Brazil since 2000, with very few accusations of fraud.
"but no one is forcing you to use it"

Actually, that is what some people believe. This is a first step by Microsoft to eventually force everyone to the Windows Store. Whether having to go through the Windows store is bad is debatable. (Yes, they will take a big chunk of profit, which for games is pretty much par, but for your average standalone Windows app is not what they are used to.)
Somehow, given the context of this thread, I suspect you're realize this wasn't really a very productive counter ;-)
Great idea, confusing UI.
Not what I was meaning. A physical ballot that you can actually put into a box that then gets counted. You don't get to keep it.
If I may offer a simple UI suggestion: Make the result box read only. Combined with the minimalist UI this makes it very confusing for first time experimenters.

Also, I would suggest a submit button for clarity (and tablets).
Why does this matter? The majority of votes is not the decider in this 'democracy'.
HN loves trolls as long as they aren't lazy about it.
Amazon Prime Adds $7.99/Month Option, Gives Netflix the Stink Eye
Awesome Chris - thank you!
I'm also interested (not in corporate America, but in corporate anyway :) ).

Me, I'm thinking of getting some freelance jobs first (without quitting) or other source or side income and then quit. I'm thinking of my car as emergency money, and I know I can get a job in a very short time if I need to come back.
Looks like a touch screen that isn't calibrated correctly.
You're suggesting folks should grade on a curve?
International Checkout Sets Trends with Great Logistics
Miscalibrated devices shipped to consumers get returned, resulting in extra costs to the retailer or manufacturer. Miscalibrated voting machines don't.