skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know what we would do if we could not grow and use cannabis as medicine. We live in california. My wife has been able to get off heavy pain killers only because of medical cannabis. We don't sell it or give it away. What we grow we use. Leave us alone big federal government. Regulate and control but don't put people in jail for a useful plant.
By my scoring, it's something like Silver 1, pundits -75.

If they had just kept quiet, it would have been easy to treat them as providing a different take. But their eagerness to beat on Silver was overreach. I can only hope that some of them will have to find honest work after this.
Proud Seattleite here too -- both gay marriage and marijuana legalization; steps in the right direction in my opinion. Will be interesting to see how much authority the Feds take on 502 (marijuana). I know the WA state lawyers have been buffing up for a big Supreme Court fight; fascinating case incoming.
Most markets got the winner right, which isn't a surprise, but they didn't get the margin right. I found Obama to win 310-330 electoral college votes at $8 on Betfair yesterday (and I put it on, and it looks like I won).

The betting markets did believe that Obama would win, but there was a lot of money on the race being closer and not as wide as Silver was predicting. This is probably because the media narrative of the past two weeks was that the race is close.

There is a rumor that some Republican donors were shortening the odds in the margin betting in order to perpetuate the line that the race is closer. I don't know how true that is, but it would be possible to move the market with a few large bets.
Apparently you need 200 karma to create a poll
Instead of thinking of him as a statistician who works for a newspaper, think of him as a statistically-minded journalist. I wish _more_ people did what he did: apply scientific reasoning to national and global issues.
That is so right. The "war on drugs" is not simply some stupid wasteful boondoggle; it is truly a heinous crime against humanity.

Some folks scoff when they hear a statement like that, but it really is true. Not because it makes it (slightly) harder for me to buy weed in San Francisco, but because of the very real and devastating effects that it has on people outside the US. People who are rarely, if ever, covered by the mainstream media.
Great work! Looks very similar to the more mature jQuery Waypoints library [1].

[1] http://imakewebthings.com/jquery-waypoints/sticky-elements/
It's looking like the Real Clear Politics Poll average is going to be 49/50.

It was 48/50 in 2008 and 49/50 in 2004.
What was the federal-state-local funding model like then? I know most municipalities continue to depend on federal funding, and I can see the US government using this (I recall a similar thing a few years ago around legal drinking ages)
Cities can do whatever they want. If you look at the distribution of dispensaries in the Bay Area, they are in SF, Oakland, San Jose, and a few other cities but none in the stretch between South SF and SJ
If I knew that the world would end in 2 years the last thing I would be doing is working.

I would spend that time with family and loved ones.
He began his career predicting baseball scores, so I guess that's more useful?
I am really looking forward to the Startup visa...its about time
What WAN Optimization Can Teach SDN about Tunneling
I did a debate on this topic 17 years ago. There are historical parallels though I don't recall the location of smaller regions legalizing marijuana within a larger nation. It's not all sunshine and roses when that happens: trafficking went up and crime stayed about the same. (from memory.)
You do know that this has been standard functionality on all the US carriers for years anyway, right? There is absolutely nothing useful about this service. One quick Google search can get you the specific domain to email to for any carrier. They all follow the same format, [number]@carrier.com. This service is about 5 years behind the times. I've been emailing to SMS since before the iPhone.
I don't get it. Would the same people who voted against this measure be in favor or reinstating the prohibition?
In other words he, with confidence, called a 1 out of 2^6 coin toss...

That either takes massive balls, or he was actually on to something.
Yeah, most of them ex-programmers turned either "Data Scientists" or "Business Analyst/Consultants".

From a career perspective, most of my friends had to prove that their time as programmers didn't "hurt" their potential to think in terms of business. I don't know where you work -you seem to be well compensated so maybie it doesn't apply- but business guys (especially in Big Co.) tend to see programmers as "workers" that "grind" what they are told to. So, besides learning the hard skills, they had to learn how to talk in "business", and to show that they know how and why the company makes money.

Some got moved around in the company they worked as programmers/devs. Others just quitted and got a job somewhere else. It all seems to deppends on your skills, your network, and how well you can sell your potential.

PS: all of them had either engineering or CS degrees.
I believe that's what he means by hitting escape quick enough.
Huh?

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/

"State-by-State Probabilities"
It is surprising in the sense that kim dotcom tweeted this into the world without any strategic foresight.

Not that I think he is a strategic genius, but this is pretty basic
I recall that the measure specifically allows for municipalities to outlaw sale and production within their jurisdiction, and I imagine many will do so. Seems like a reasonable compromise to me.
Louis vuitton belt
That simply isn't true. 90% of the things you can 3D print you can machine with a CNC mill. 10% of the things you can make with a CNC mill you can make with a 3D printer.

If residential manufacturing was coming, it would have come a long time ago via CNC technology. Additive vs subtractive is really just a methodology. There are probably more people out there that need custom metal parts for their car, boat, motorcycle hobby than people that only need plastic parts for their hobby. Although I know several with CNC mills and lathes in their garage, it is simply not going main stream.

I think 3D printing has a lot of value (especially 3D printing powered aluminum to make low-volume plastic injection molds), but I don't think you will see one in every home.

(Mechanical Engineer here)
Hmm. Good counter-example.
Before sending my emails to co-workers and clients I check the first word of each paragraph. The mistake I tend to make is to start each sentence with "I" (not a native speaker).

Here, we have "I, We, I, Basically, I, As and Hey", and in the middle of the text there are far far more "I"s and "we"s than I find somewhat acceptable, either. Perhaps the rate is this bad in comparison to my language where the subject is given implicitly in affixes?

Regardless, how emails like this one can be seen as focused on the reader when you know less about the target audience?
Million-Dollar Traders Replaced With Machines Amid Cuts
I'd love for him to go to past elections and see how well our political voting system works...
Hard cold numbers won again.

The venom directed at Nate Silver before the election was astonishing. I guess the pundits had sensed their careers of predication were numbered and fought back hard, but Nate was proved right again. Kudos.
Maybe I'm showing my hn colours, but I'm surprised by no mention of SOPA/PIPA.

I would have thought broad policies which have already been introduced as bills during the last term in office would be more significant to technology than potential immigration reforms.

I note that I'm not from the USA, so my perspective might not be as well-informed as it could be.
One benefit of legalization is a drop in violent crime.
This is true. But there is a strong case for increasing font size on a mini, and letting the content breath more. So dropping a RHS column would help that.

This is if you believe in non-zoomable design. If you allow the user to zoom, one option would be to deliver full desktop design and content, as you prefer.
Someone is threatening you with an attorney, you absolutely must speak with an attorney to have a fair chance.

There are some really bad answers in here. The way you handle this situation will decide your fate, you need to speak with someone who has the expertise to explain to you what your options are and what potential consequences each will have.

Since money is a problem you may want to follow this up with a question like "Ask HN: Does anyone know a patent attorney that will help me pro bono?"
The problem with 'doing things that you can only do on a 3D printer' is that you have locked yourself into a 3D printer.

My plan as a hardware entrepreneur would be to 3D print prototypes and MVPs, maybe even the first production run. Then transition to prototype molds or CNC machining with a lot of setup/teardown. Finally you go with full blown steel molds, dedicated machines, fixtures, etc.

If you design for for only 3D printing, you can't scale past 3D printing.
You are correct about the discrimination against many minorities. When it comes to foreign policy, Russia will go to hell and back to protect its people (i.e., South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and the Georgian invasion) but when it comes to internal matters, there is a growing nationalism among the populism.

Navalny, for example, is a known supporter of nationalists despite being "Putin's number one enemy" and the most visible opposer to his regime. Furthermore, you'd have to try not to find videos of Russian nationalists murdering minorities on Google and Youtube. Many people who immigrate from the -stan countries are the equivalent of Mexicans in the United States, having faced constant discrimination for taking Russians' jobs (in construction for instance).
This is truer today than it once was. Go back, say, 15 years and you'll find any number of word processor and presentation formats that are only readable by long-gone software. I agree that, today, we've (mostly) coalesced around a modest number of standards that are either open or, at least, widely used and well-documented.
US election 2012: live results map (Barack Obama re-elected as President)
That's a real strawman argument. There are real, tangible, and very good reasons for wanting drug cartels to go out of business, starting with the fact that they play fast and loose with the lives of humans, traffic drugs through sex slaves across borders, dump their stuff on kids, get children involved with gangs when they're young, cheat their own customers by cutting their drugs w/ what boils down to poison to save a penny, promote drug-related gang violence resulting in mass shootings and the death of innocent bystanders, make money without paying taxes, and so on and so forth.

Whereas me opening "Mike's Magic Marijuana Stand" next to the corner deli means I get my shipments via UPS, I pay my taxes, I sell directly to the clients that want it, I don't exploit children and women, I don't involve myself in bribery, I make sure my customers are over 21, I don't smuggle arms to defend my turf, and overall I'm not a blight on the face of the planet.

QED?
Consuming Twitter’s Streaming API using Python and cURL
Wow: http://www.larry.denenberg.com/predictions.html

"Who first said "It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future (or one of its many variants)?"
this is essentially built into css now, with position: sticky

http://updates.html5rocks.com/2012/08/Stick-your-landings-po...
One very large appeal of bcrypt is its memory usage characteristics. SHA1 is easily done on GPUs, and can be massively parallel with very little work. Simply rehashing doesn't adequately replicate the barriers that bcrypt puts in place to brute-forcing.

See: http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/400/why-cant-one-i...
I almost prefer honest, outright, mathematically incontradictable racism to the American variety, where considerations favoring a diverse student body counsel holistic evaluation of candidates such that a Goldberg or Tanaka might, despite being a superior student of math, might be less the student the university needs than certain other students
PayPal Denies It Was Hacked By Anonymous
Wow. Local politics on HN, even Palo Alto, might be a little bit too narrowly scoped :)
Probably not, but it's plausible that they might be against opening three new bars in their neighborhood.
California continues to confuse me.
As an aside on Kickstarter since I brought it up, it is interesting they recently banned virtual renderings of design projects. Rapid prototyping allows for moving from virtual models to prototyped models easily, quickly, and cheaply. The problem is that the prototypes in no way prove the company is ready to handle the demands of transitioning into production, or that the prototype has had any reliability testing.

-- This was interesting aside
It shows how important it is to have experience and know your domain when you build a model and how understanding your subject matter is more important than cleverness.

Mr. Silver is one of the most clever people we have on the public stage, but that doesn't mean he has a silver bullet for everything. Rather, it enables him to work in a field that he knows very well and knock it out of the park.
That's odd -- I just tried it in FF16 and it seemed to be working fine. It should definitely work cross-browser, but if you find a reason why it's not I'd love to hear it!
My only suggestion is that v1 of anything will be a bit jankedy. I'm not making excuses for Surface at all, just that a reasonable person expects problems with a v1 product, esp from MSFT.
Well done! I felt it used a lot of the points from this article on how to cold email people: http://www.ashmaurya.com/2012/08/cold-emailing/
Yes.

1) The tax money does something tangible for my state right here. Whether it's education, tax cuts on other things, or increases in the civic services, I will get a direct benefit from my state government making more money as opposed to the cartel.

2) Is there anyone on earth worse to give money to than the cartels? I guess terrorists, but these guys are killing literally thousands of people. I don't care what moral equivalency you try to make, the fact is they're pulling the trigger and causing many innocent people to die.
I tend to agree that all substances should be legal, I'm just stumped when it comes to implementation. I'm sure most people wouldn't be too happy if a heroin or crack shop opened up in their neighborhood though. Should we allow the passing of ordinances preventing the operation of such shops? Should the selling be handled by designated shops at all?
For sending text messages that is correct. It may not be clear enough that the purpose of e-mailing a [NUMBER]@thinbox.com address is not to send an SMS to someone's phone. The initial SMS is just a way to ASK for the recipient's e-mail address and create a mapping that works for future e-mails. So essentially it just couples two separate types of "addresses" for a person into a single address.
Has banning people from shooting meth into the webbing of their fingers stopped them?

No. It has only made things worse.

100% legalization for all substances.
He should have the right to self-identify as a witch if he wants. You have no right to take that away from him.
For me, that was an especially good starting statement, though with no cliffhanger as such.

It reflected the emailer's intention to not waste my time. Tells me who they are, and tells me it's not a sort of long-winded spam. Sure, I have skimmed it (glazed over?) and came back to it later after reading other parts of the email. But it gave me the option to bail out while promising interesting things if I am interested.
It certainly seems like this is the tipping point. Overall national support for decriminalization is at just over 50%. Several of the most populous states, such as California, have medical marijuana, decriminalization, or outright legalization statutes on the books or have just passed them. All of the west coast is pro legalization.

I imagine that once there is more social acceptance of marijuana out in the open and a longer track record of legalized marijuana without society crumbling more and more people will come around on the idea.
I think the joke is that people are claiming to have depression etc. in order to get "medicinal" marijuana.
Do any of them equal 1? Saying that >50% probability means that the model picks the state for Obama would be fine as a classification rule, but he's trying to estimate the probabilities, not forecast who will win.

The ~20% comes from the electoral vote distribution, where you can back out the mix of states that gives 332 Electoral college votes.
Were you honestly unable to type faster than 10wpm after using it for a week? I find that....odd to believe (not saying you're lying - I just find it strange). How fast can you type normally? On my regular desktop keyboard I type at an average of 80wpm which I think is ok. On my touchcover I can type at an average of like 65wpm. So sure, slower than my desktop keyboard but not frustrating by any means.

I'd say that I got up to speed and used to the keyboard within a day or two of use.

I'm glad that you acknowledge that the app store problem is short-term. A lot of reviewers disregard that. I am quite confident that the apps will come so you just need to be patient. With that said, I'd like to point out that there is a pandora app (not sure if it is official, but it works fine). Spotify I am still waiting for but Xbox Music does the job until then.

Agreed that the speakers are meh.

I don't know though. I'd still pick this over an iPad any day of the week. The keyboard really does it for me. I'm typing this comment out on my desktop but I could have just as easily typed it from my Surface. Try doing that on an iPad. It would be exhausting. So even for tasks that aren't "work" but just involve creating content (even something as small as a HN comment) - the surface runs laps around iPad.

edit: one final thing. Remote desktop is a great feature on this device. Whenever I want to use an x86 app on Surface RT, I just remote into my desktop at home. Works pretty much flawlessly. I especially like that typing seems to be simulated from the client end, so even if there IS network lag, your typing isn't affected by it.
The government is a protection racket. Laws against weed violate the sovereignty of hte individual. It's absurd that the primary argument is tax revenue. Really shows how whacked politics and American's conception of government is.
> Is marijuana bad and the government needs to bribed to let it?

"The government", no; but many voters, yes. There are a lot of people who don't use cannabis and don't have any interest in whether or not it's legal, but are swayed by the potential tax revenues.

It was the bargain necessary to get the votes to pass it. Perhaps in the future the tax rate will be stepped down if it's really felt to be excessive or if there's widespread avoidance, or at least the double-taxation aspect will be eliminated, but it might just stay: depending on what the price of cannabis turns out to be in the marketplace, the 25% tax might still end up being lower than the total (state + federal) taxes levied on cigarettes in many places.
Doesn't that destroy the allegations of voting fraud in the US? (Not a US-citizen here)

If there was widespread fraud with the voting machines as alleged elsewhere, the voting outcome should have diverged widely from the predictions. The predictions are so close to the actual outcome, and because from what I understand the predictions are mostly based on polling, there couldn't have been much fraud, or am I wrong?

Flippant edit: Assuming of course that Nate Silver wasn't in on the fraud and didn't adjust his predictions accordingly.
The issues raised about the materials engineering are not trivial. If you are in the market for custom designs, you are likely looking to spec high-grade parts/materials, for a special use.
patio, You are usually a clear writer, so the contorted structure of your post suggests that you do not feel comfortable saying what you mean, for some reason.

There is a difference between "promoting diversity and inclusion of many social/economic/ethnic groups" vs "singling some out for extreme exclusion"
Perhaps this will lead to a greater interest in statistics and data in general politics and less in pundit opinions. Haha, who am I kidding...
I've got to say that I've been a cynical admirer of Silver since the last election.

Why cynical? Because I began to notice throughout the Republican nomination process that his observations varied wildly on which Republican candidate presented great values on intrade. I think over time he gave a nod to every candidate, save Michelle Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty, and John Huntsmann. From the outset, Romney was the favorite to win, and not surprisingly, he won. But throughout the nomination process where much less was known, many of his projections proved to be wrong. So despite all of the contrarian opinion on which candidates may pull it out against popular opinion (or perception) these faded away until Romney was the clear favorite, Silver predicted him to win, and eventually he carried the nomination.

Once in the Presidential election, Obama was the favorite. Incumbent Presidents rarely lose, and Mitt Romney was not exactly a compelling candidate.

All that said, he's clearly a brilliant dude, and I give him a lot of respect for the accuracy of his predictions. I just haven't found them to be hugely useful for any practical purposes. I guess people tend to be enamored by the things they don't understand (statistical analysis), and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
You are putting the cart before the horses. The first question is "why would anyone buy it?", and if you don't give an excellent reason for that, you will not see a 3D printer in everyone's home. And this makes your question about possible things as useless as a designer's contest (where most of the prizes are awarded for physically impossible designs).
Cartels are armed gangs. They are oppressors, they are violators, they are terrorists. That is their nature. Currently the cartels in Mexico have plunged that country into a bizarre kind of civil war. Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed. Per year. Massacres of civilians by the cartels have been common. Assassinations of judges, prosecutors, and police has been routine. Nearly 60 reporters have been killed. Nearly a thousand children. 1.6 million people have been internally displaced and made refugees in trying to escape the violence.

And this is just in Mexico.

None of these things are natural consequences of giving money to corporations.
This article isn't saying that 3D printers aren't important, it actually acknowledges that they are already revolutionizing and democratizing the way new products are developed.

More striking arguments are unfortunately point in time statements, about the current capabilities of technology and the market maturity.

I am not saying that the CNC manufacturing will progress by leaps and bounds towards bringing $100K prototyping machines down to $2K in the next few years, but with increased focus on improving the lower end of the spectrum, and pushing its limits, we will actually find new uses for them as well.

I also don't believe that the ordinary person will go about designing their own parts. However, there will be a good market for people to hire designers, or for small time designers to collaborate to improve open source products.

e.g. One of the biggest ways that I see 3D printing and CNC in general as being important in producing parts replacements. How many times have you needed a broken or missing part for the affordable furniture that we buy from IKEA, Walmart, or Target?

As we use 3D printed pieces, we'll have to use materials which will perhaps be weaker, or in some cases unnecessarily strong but expensive. But, it will be fine, because it will do such amazing things we will not care.