skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The consumer electronics industry has shipped hundreds of millions of touch screens in the last few years and i've not seen a single article complaining that they opened up their new tablet/phone to find it mis-calibrated and that their touches were off my such a huge margin. Why are voting machines apparently subject to calibration problems that other touch screen devices are not?
They didn't fix anything. Multiple people noticed, all of them contacted the network in question, then they took credit publicly when another network fixed its mistake.
My cheatsheet was a simple condensed table of "this | produces this" beneath the post textfield.

Also, other communities that deal with a similar audience had the same problem with Markdown and moved back to BBCode. For example, these guys (http://guildwork.com/forum/threads/4e46f3d5205cb22721000765-...) moved from BBCode to Markdown and then ended up moving back and writing their own BBCode parser in Python.

Markdown is good when users have limited syntactical/formatting options. But BBCode makes it easier to extend features with an intuitive syntax that nobody seems to have trouble with.

One example would be Markdown's dependence on character glyphs:

![my puppy](mypuppy.jpg)
[click here](http://google.com)

preformatted
text

While BBCode is easy to recall in plain English and you don't need to remember any glyphs or the order of them:

[img]mypuppy.jpg[/img]
[url="http://google.com"]click here[/url]
[code]
preformatted
text
[/code]

Adding dice and a youtube embedder to BBCode intuitively extends the syntax set. It doesn't introduce any new symbols or anything.

[dice]4d6[/dice]
[youtube]http://youtube.com/v?i2h38aoj[/youtube]

Finally, it's been half a decade since I used Wordpress and I think I'm way off topic here since, on second thought, I'm pretty sure Wordpress just offers a WYSIWYG editor that lets you drop into html. Doesn't even use any sort of BBCode-like syntax. :O)
I kind of buy the 20 grams thing, actually. When I went to look at the iPhone 5 I noticed it felt lighter and discovered that it's only 28 grams lighter. Still, the surface didn't feel particularly heavy to me and I use iPad every day.

It's really not a bad first stab from Microsoft. I hope we can assume that the next rev will be even better a la Xbox (and not what happened with Zune).
The obvious question to ask: Why is that part not shown in the video?

Edit: Just watched the video again. The video suspiciously freezes from 11s to 18s. Probably, something inconvenient being edited out amateurishly?
from the article (emphasis mine):
> I initially selected Obama but Romney was highlighted. I assumed it was being picky so I deselected Romney and tried Obama again, this time more carefully, and still got Romney. Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney’s name and started tapping very closely together to find the ‘active areas’. From the top of Romney’s button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama’s name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein’s button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.
I don't understand why isn't there a national council responsible for maintaining consistent and well run elections.

To me it would seem like an easy win to push for it and push it through. "We need to preserve our democracy!" "Any one who doesn't vote for this bill, is unamerican!" "We cannot let our ability to vote be assaulted!" etc.
Except this just frustrates the voter and maybe he doesn't bother voting for Obama at all. There's no accusation of "altering" the votes because how do you track, "Touchscreen didn't select Obama, voter just gave up?"
So I'm 9 days late to this thread (don't know how I missed it, I must have been doing something), but I can't let this infectious antitruth stand.

There are indeed men with guns, dogs, and even armored vehicles forcing you to carry out most of your transactions in USD, thereby giving value to USD no matter how poorly it is being managed. Maximizing production through government spending and new money creation overdriving the economy is the thesis of Keynesian economics. What exactly does a 0.2% interest rate say about how we view preparing for tomorrow?
Why so many of this rejoinder? "Early release! Don't be so harsh!"

Ok, here's a direct quote from the article – how come everyone's ignoring it?

So if it took Apple a couple tries to perfect the tablet, shouldn’t we cut Microsoft some slack, too?

No, we shouldn’t. The first iPad was released in 2010. It may not have been perfect, but it was unquestionably the best tablet of its era. The Surface is hitting the shelves in 2012, when, in addition to Apple’s tablets, you can now get Google’s Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 or one of Amazon’s super-cheap Kindle Fires. Because it was first to market, Apple’s first-generation device had some leeway to miss the mark, but its competitors have little room for error. Anyone who’s considering this tablet will be forced to stack it against the competition, and the Surface doesn’t wear these comparisons well.
Is it too much to ask to just completely open-source these voting machine? These machines decide the future of our country and affect the entire world. The least we could do is allow everyone to verify for themselves whether the machines are secure.
I run an HFT group, and what he describes isn't what we'd call "retail". He was doing a number of things that professional shops do, including making markets to avoid paying the spread
and paying attention to queue position to predict execution

With a bit of luck and a good partner, this guy could have built a sustainable business.
Something interesting, while not directly related to this topic, would be interactive mathematical widgets on wikipedia. There are a bunch of old java applets floating around for this kind of thing, and they really helped me understand concepts like 3D graphics. It would be nice if wikipedia had those.
Nope, there is absolutely no way to do this with python or ruby. :)

Seriously though, there are some existing frameworks and products that you could check out. I haven't used this myself, it's just in my bookmarks:

http://www.rapidquant.com/features

A C++ library with python bindings:
http://quantlib.org/index.shtml

And a low level library for data analysis:
http://pandas.pydata.org
Interactive datomic browser tool
I'm not claiming it is malicious, but would they? If they can swing even 1% of the votes of people who just don't care enough, or would feel embarrassed at failing to use a machine, they can have a significant impact while having an obvious scapegoat.

Assuming it's miscalibration, how many people used this machine before the video? how many afterward?

>I then called over a volunteer to have a look at it. She him hawed for a bit then calmly said “It’s nothing to worry about, everything will be OK.” and went back to what she was doing. I then recorded this video.

That sounds like they were very likely the first person to complain. What did the rest do?
> If you never hear about these things in your own country that means that apparently no one there cares.

Or that they don't happen...
Which websites actually honor Do Not Track headers, and how?
The US is schizophrenic about whether it wants to be one country or not.
Highly doubtful that an election machine would be able to pass any standard tests that would allow it to be specifically rigged like that by an election worker. If it were built to calibrate on only part of a screen, it would be ripe for rigging by both sides.
confirmed by NBC http://on.msnbc.com/TIyxAl
What's the virtual memory situation on Windows RT? Does it use a pagefile?
Then the issue could be the system is damaged. There are these sort of touch screen systems all over England in train stations and every single one I've used has problems with the "next" button because of how much usage they see.

My point is "alter" is something that has to be done on purpose, by using the word alter they are stating the system KNOWS the user is voting for Obama and changes it to Romney.
There are lots of other shiny new things that he could have learned. Clojure happens to be a rather practical new language to learn if you already know Java, and ClojureScript has a pretty small hump if you already know Clojure and JavaScript (which, lest anyone forget, is about 15 years old now).
Even there, I guess the risk is deemed too high. ICBM silos typically are not built on the border of your country, and even if they were, those rockets could still crash in your country or in a friendly or neutral country they pass over en route to their target. That unlimited range isn't worth much, either, as conventional rockets already have sufficient range (as long as we are targeting things on earth) Finally, I suspect it is cheaper and easier to build and maintain a conventionally powered ICBM than to build a nuclear powered one.
SquareOne Mail for iPhone - finally a helpful mobile email assistant
Selection bias, perhaps. Sure, there will be a small amount of miscalibrated machines. And a smaller amount will happen to be miscalibrated to select the wrong candidate. But you'll only ever hear about those latter cases. The others will be caught and corrected without internet vitriol.
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It's too bad that the video doesn't provide any evidence supporting that story.
The video would be truly compelling if he had repeatedly tapped from Romney to Stein. As it is, the video appears to show miscalibration, and only his testimony suggests fraud. If the video showed what he claimed, it would be lawsuit material.
Yes, very likely a calibration issue. There was a similar instance occurring here in Colorado [1], but in the opposite direction (a vote for Romney went in as Obama). The machines definitely need to get better, but it is probably not fraud or a hack of any sort.

[1] http://www.chieftain.com/politics/pueblo-county-voting-machi...
I am also really curious about these points and would like to hear what Chris has to say about them.
> We have > 300 M people. That's a huge population

Um, unless you're talking to India which manages to pull off votes with 1.2 Billion People. You are like 25% their population.
Which is proper. The report that the volunteer said "everything will be okay" is the worst part of this. Systems need to recognize and isolate damage, not assume it will never occur.
Seems like bandwidth costs would kill this, restoring a TB is $120 in bandwidth alone, then you have the retrieval fee.

I agree with some others that the cheapest for now is buying more HD and keeping them in sync with crashplan or something else, until Google Drive drops a bit further in price for 1tb.
"Just don't configure it that way" -Jen-Hsun
What's wrong with paper ballots again? Serious question.

In my area (northern MA), voters are given a ballot with a bubble next to each of the candidates' names. You use a marker to fill in the bubble next to the candidate you want to vote for, like 6-year-olds manage to do all the time on multiple choice tests in school. Then it gets read in by a machine, leaving a paper trail just in case.

How are these electronic voting machines any better than that? With all the technical/fraud issues surrounding them, wouldn't it make sense to just use paper?
I hear this a lot from people who haven't actually tried the keyboard and trackpad. Trackpad is so small that I truly found it unusable. It's fair to say that it's smaller than any laptop or even netbook trackpad out there. The non-mechanical keyboard was also unusable for me, but I think TypeCover keys would be much better.
I found the original Google+ post more striking. If anyone wants to access that directly: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+SergeyBrin/posts/B9VnJXd6Rir

This is a good move from Brin in my opinion, even though he can do little more than speak about the matter. There's nothing more dangerous to a stable democracy than a two party system. In Britain with more prominent parties (Even though only two really get elected) I still feel like my politics aren't being represented.
I wouldn't attribute to malice what can be explained by a faulty touch screen. These incidents hurt the trust on the election process, though.

The machines used on Brazillian elections are simpler but much better thought out, since it's impossible to input the wrong candidate. You have to input the number of the candidate, review his information and photo, then press "confirm" button. It doesn't present a list of candidates to choose from, so there are no biases. The US should adopt a similar machine. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Brazil#The_Brazili...
This is a very mean and unconstructive comment to someone who made the impressive achievement of building his own automated trading system and actually making money from it. I've started calling out comments like this one, because they cause a bad environment for useful discussion.

The only argument in your comment that isn't your own unfounded opinion is that market makers make money from people who execute trades. But this is true by definition.

The traders who "gleefully picked off all those trades" weren't outsmarting anyone, they were simply profiting from the difference in the asking and offering price in the market. This is the role of a market maker, and actually makes it cheaper for people like OP to execute a large number of trades. So even though this comment sounds like a sensible rebuttal of the linked article, it doesn't really say anything at all.

Again, sorry for creating a negative reply and contributing to a bad tone, but I really the right thing is to call out these kinds of replies. They discourage honest sharing and discussion.

yajoe's comment is an example of how to criticize a post like this in a useful way. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4748989
From what I'm getting:

./LightTable: error while loading shared libraries: libudev.so.0: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64

It appears that the linux version is 32bit only. :-/
Candidate Scoreboard by The Google Politics & Elections team
There are definitely security risks added by co-tenant VM, but there are actually security benefits possible for virtualization if you also own the hardware. Don't hate virtualization just because some applications make security worse.
> But it's very strange that it was "miscalibrated" to not select one particular candidate, no? :)

The internet loves Obama. There are many stories of people that support Obama cheating the system (right now there's a popular story of someone admitting on Facebook to voting for Obama 4 times...) and that isn't on the front page of HN, when that is absolutely confirmed to be a misuse of the system.

Everything that is a disadvantage for Obama is naturally going to get more attention, because most of the internet age that use sites like reddit and HN are the sort that want progress.

I'll bet there are machines that have this problem (assuming this is not an isolated incident and his a software/hardware issue) that vote for Obama when Romney is clicked, but that won't be big news in this circle of news because who cares about Romney here?

Edit: here you go, same problem that affects Romney votes on another machine http://www.cbs42.com/content/localnews/story/Voting-machines...
Interesting that imagination is pursuing the CPU + gpu one stop shop like arm/Mali
I didn't mean to incite Google v/s DuckDuckGo war by posting this page. I once had an idea of having a smart Hacker News search. The idea is that the full web might have too much noise. Hacker News serves to be a collection of webpages that are interesting to us, and are intelligent. Moreover, each of them have a rating associated with them, and we don't need back-link analysis to rank them.

If I search for startup ideas in Google(full web) or in Hacker News(the interesting subset of the web), I would have a much better result in the latter, that will ensure that only those articles come that have been 'approved' by the HN community, and not noise and fraud that Google might have picked up.

Now, current hacker news searches like site:news.ycombinator.com or hnsearch fail to do this. I'm not just interested in things with this domain name, or doing exact string matches. I want to Search, and all the algorithms and techniques that made a proper search engine like magic. What hnsearch is doing is basically grep.

This DDG plugin is the closest approximation to my idea, but still not perfect. Hopefully, some day I will find from my busy semester schedule and make something awesome from this idea and show you guys. :)
> "Electronic voting should be allowed but not unless it prints out a ballot with all your selections on it so you can verify and have a real paper trail"

The lack of a receipt is deliberate and prevents vote-buying. A carbon copy of your vote will open as many avenues to fraud as it will close.
If you vote with paper, you don't worry at all if it's counted right.

Note that this doesn't mean it's counted right: it just means you have no way to worry about it. Maybe election officials are debating whether that line for Joe is a mistake or not. Now the problems are seen immediately instead of unseen, which was one of the driving forces for people who didn't want to ever go through the hanging chad issue again.

I'm certainly not saying computer voting is better than paper voting -- they each have their trade-offs. (I'd prefer paper ballots that voters can "self-scan" by a machine that is very conservative in what it accepts, but that's a whole separate discussion.)
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Note the video didn't show him trying to select other candidates.
Dear Sir, As an Indian I can testify that we actually have far more election abuse - people being blocked from entering a voting booth, vote boxes(still vote on paper) being stolen, voting booths set on fire...

Of course, again, there is media acting as a watchdog, and a hope that the manipulation is statistically insignificant.
I still don't really understand to process to get new stuff in wikipedia, it seems really complicated to change something there. I guess when you have so many content you need to have some inertia but still.
The only "usage" I have seen advertised is the picture password feature.
Our government is structured in such a way that elections are run at the local level, which can be seen as a strength. Imagine how dangerous it could be if one company manufactured every single voting machine used in every single polling place.
I edited to add the disclaimer. Thanks for calling me out on that.

I understand that most people on HN will probably use Glacier directly, and that is totally OK. The service that I am offering is not "making it possible", rather it's "making it simple, so much so that your grandmother can use it". You do use Dropbox in the same way, don't you?
Also, the reason it's obscure is that is less than a week old and has less than 40 users. I wouldn't expect any offering of that age/size to be well-known, so I'm quite satisfied with my obscurity.

ct is cents. For Europe, that will be Euro cents, all other areas will be billed in USD cents.
Very important to understand that making $500k speculatively is not evidence of an 'edge', nor is trading frequency evidence of the absence of luck. From March 2009 through much of 2010, the market was strongly bullish - if his algorithm showed a positive market bias then his returns would primarily be a function of timing (read luck: and there are a million variants on the nature of the bias that could be unwittingly responsible for his returns, despite the frequency of trades).

We cannot even tell if $500k is a good risk adjusted return - we have no information on volatility, nature of the exposure or most importantly how much money he started with?

Not exactly shocked Jim Simons didn't return his email. But completely shocking that he walked away from a successful automated trading strategy... the only thing rarer than a free lunch is a man willing to walk away from one. suspect.
The very thought of working fulltime on my own products/ideas is intoxicating, a daydream that never ceases to get me to close all my browser tabs and open up Vim.
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The first post was definitely better than the ArsTechnica coverage. However it was not the actual research, the previously linked post was an analysis by a crypto professor from JHU. The work was done by researchers at UNC, UW and RSA, the actual paper can be found here:

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~reiter/papers/2012/CCS.pdf
Confirmed with bluehost:

"It looks like the reason you are running into these problems is due to the CPU throttling that your account is intermittently undergoing."
Your willingness to learn new things on your own should help you get your foot in the door as far as interviews. It's a total developer's market right now, so I would encourage you to quit your job and start looking for a position.
I use classic shell with win8. It gives me everything I was use to and I can boot to desktop mode. I think they will bring back some of what they took out in order to cater to businesses. They know businesses will not touch win8 as is and need to reincorporate what was removed during the refactor of win8. There is still support for god mode as well
These are all things I plan to talk about in my next blog post :)
I am tired of corporate way of building software with long development cycles and awful and aging stacks. Doing a side project allows me to learn cool new stuff, provides me a playground where I can do mistakes and learn and most importantly it allows me to do "customer development" which is essential for any viable startup.
Odds algorithm
How to Rig an Election: The G.O.P. aims to paint the country red
http://harpers.org/archive/2012/11/how-to-rig-an-election/?s...
> http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=countries%20by%20popula...

this is a lot of people. I am sure that if we investigate the details of elections in India, Indonesia, and Brazil, we will find an array of fudged votes and issues.

In other words, I am pretty sure that the error rate for the mix of remote/paper/electronic voting will hold pretty constant regardless of population size.
i'm curious if there's any reasoning to 300 grams. I don't have an iPad, but i've used one, and it seemed fine to me - i guess over a long period it could become uncomfortable.
It's so funny to see that hardly anyone actually did anything more than just watch the video. The same "oh it must have been miscalibrated" is repeated up and down the comment page.

Let's hope whomever gets elected spends money on education so that people start reading again and not just consuming the 5 second Reader's Digest version.
I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to type in the result field. May not be the standard ux though - I'm on a tablet.