skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're purposely missing the point - Artists have been giving away their recorded music for free ever since Hollywood accounting was invented.

Much as how labels didn't care about properly compensating artists, artists don't care if the labels make bad investments by relying on projected figures that no longer correspond to reality.
Ask HN: Who is being paid for work on the night?
I work from 9am to 5pm, but in "good old days" I used to code on the night. 9pm-5am used to be my best time - it's difficult to explain, but I love to work at midnight and early morning - family sleeping, neighbourhood sleeping, city sleeping, addictive silence. During the day I do all non-programming stuff

I know it can be true for freelancers, but is there some company rewarding their employees for working on the night? Specifically I mean programmers, designers and other creative people.

thanks
One way hash with secret salt would work. You enter a secret password as a salt and get a hash code from all your votes so you have a provable record your vote got counted that you can verify but no body can reverse to know it's you.

Then stick all the votes up on a server somewhere. Let us go and check our votes are in the list. We could then have informal verification and audits of the counts.
Yeah, sounds like the UI is a problem for many, and I can see why. I was going for something as minimalist as possible, but clearly I went too far. Thanks for your suggestions!
Did you miss the States part of "United States of America"? Ever since Madison's brilliant compromise at the founding of our current government http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_Compromise the USA has tried to be mindful of the sovereignty of the states. (America's previous government, under the Articles of Confederation, was a loose agreement among the states http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State%27s_rights#Controversy_to...) The balance got out of hand in the mid-1800's and a civil war broke out over the issues of states' rights vs. the federal government. Generally, states have the freedom to run elections in any way they want without interference from the federal government.

In fact there was a case in my home state of New Hampshire a few years ago, where a state worker was investigated for not using funds that had been made available by the federal government for each state to use for elections. The state worker's defense was that the money had strings attached; basically there were some restrictions on how the federal money could be used during the election. The investigation was dropped immediately, in favor of the worker. Basically my state would rather spend millions of extra dollars to run the elections than allow the federal government to put restrictions on the way they run elections.
For me it all looks like a bad-written fiction, and the source is just a blog post.
I feel like I can't contribute much further than Yglesias did,

>Political partisanship is kind of like representative democracy itself—a terrible mess, but clearly superior to the alternatives. After all, we don't need to guess at what representative democracy without political parties would look like. Just examine almost any American city council—be it New York, DC, Chicago, San Francisco, whatever—and you'll see a legislative body that's so overwhelmingly Democratic that partisan politics don't drive outcomes. The result of this isn't a utopia of good government and sound policy, it's an orgy of hyper-localism.

>Political parties are organized, for better and for worse, around clashing visions of what's better for America. The quest for partisan advantage is, among other things, a quest for the opportunity to build a better society. Absent parties you get a situation where instead of a clash of visions of what would be best for the city as a whole, council members give undue preference to strong local interests. In city government, that means NIMBYism. In Congress it would mean endless gobs of the much-derided pork barrelling.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/11/06/sergei_brin_h...
For those who are able to understand german and are not from the US, i highly recommend the newest alternativlos podcast for perspective:

http://alternativlos.org/28/
Very cool embed.
Nice job to the Sketchfab team!
There is plenty of research and sample implementations of electronic voting schemes in which the final outcome is verifiable without anyone being able to see anyone else's vote.

As an example, I worked with Michael Clarkson on an implementation of Civitas:
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/papers/civitas-tr.pdf
What do you expect? Opaque source-code, machines produced by companies linked to the Republicans, and all that in a failing state. Stuff like that was obviously going to happen.
And here I thought in the Turing year of 2012 people would finally start to understand what it means that any electronical voting machine contains a Turing equivalent machine.

No magic can make the halting problem decidable.
I wrote a response, but HN ate it, and I don't really care to rewrite it.

Basically, you've got a very exclusive view of what is a blog, and I think you've got the wrong definition of a blog. You say that your blog requires comments and wouldn't exist without them. To me, that sounds a lot more like a discussion forum than a blog.

Look at any top blog today, do they need comments. Would they disappear without them? Or, are the comments just a nice feature that people enjoy, but doesn't really change the nature of what they publish?

To me, comments are to blogs as radios are to cars. Sure, most cars have radios, but they don't need them to function. It makes the definition a whole lot more inclusive, and it should ring true to everyone. Cars of old did not have radios, blogs of old did not have comments, but as they've aged they both added new features that people enjoy (radios and comments), but to function properly, neither needs them.

If a "blog" is dependent on comments, I argue that it isn't a blog, because what is a blog but an online journal? Each of the five definitions I posted (four of which you failed to even look at or comment on) says that blogs are online diaries or journals based on experiences or hobbies. Only Wikipedia mentions comments, and only Wikipedia says "most good" blogs have them. While they may have them, there is no functional requirement that they have to be there, same with the car radio.

All cellphones have more functions than just calling a phone number and being portable. They can all store contacts in them, most have calculators, most have some personalizations you can make. Because they all have contacts, and most have calculators, do all cellphones have to have them to be considered a cellphone?

----

Your server part irks me. It irks me because it's wrong. You're defining the software that runs on top of the server as the server itself. Generic servers (apache, lighttpd, nginx, thin, etc) have no idea how to process a *back call. They can read POST requests, but they'll just forward that on to the software running on top of the server.

Sure, one could modify them to know how to process those requests in the specified manner, but than they wouldn't be the generic server, they'd be a specialized server.
I did not use the word linear.

Obviously scaling is hard, but I would expect that's one of the things a well functioning, well funded government should take care of, much like how Facebook and Google manage to scale well.
Denmark? I've never heard of these sort of things happening around here.
Someone can give you money to vote for a specific candidate and verify that you voted correctly via the confirmation code.
300m people is a complete red herring. That also means you have many more people available to process ballots / provide infrastructure.
Jeez, I thought HN people were sharper than this about modern technology. I'm not a Romney supporter but these voting machines are basic single touch interfaces with standard fat-finger algorithms. Lets have him pull back on the camera and show the rest of the screen. Specifically, where his other finger is at the time it selects Romney. His video is highly suspect to me.
So say if some party were to gain power and start harassing people that voted for the other party...
One external online provider really only counts as "one copy", ever. This is primarily because you cannot audit the ongoing storage architecture and processes of any given provider. You're looking for SPOFs, not how many disks may hold data replicas. One software error (or site/account hack) can wipe out all of your data. Or an entirely out-of-band error occurs: the provider goes belly-up.

Cloud storage is awesome in many ways. Yet it doesn't replace your backup strategy, it merely complements it.
Exactly. This is known as Duverger's Law.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duvergers_law
Pinching on mobile safari right now and it's sharp enough where I can't tell whether it's LCD lag or rendering blur. Maybe Apple is using a better image scaling algorithm?
2012 US Presidential Election coverage, live on Pulse
Hi, thanks for your answer. Yes, after reading the Rules again it became clear to me that spotted posts are frowned upon here. I also received an e-mail from someone at HN. So the good news is, we're talking :)
If you do release the source, what's the best way to be notified of this? Your Twitter account looks pretty active? I'm particularly interested in your risk management strategies (this is where my previous efforts fell short).
I hope my next project uses Datomic's DB; its got versioning built-in.
You don't need to compromise secrecy. Are we ever going to stop complaining and call for using 3ballot or one of the any other methods? http://rangevoting.org/Rivest3B.html
That's a side effect of the way we've suborned the electoral college. When an individual in the U.S. "votes for a Presidential candidate", they are actually voting in a state-wide election (to determine who the state's electors vote for). The election isn't national, so there's usually no need for the Federal government to be involved.

That's also one reason we're so hesitant to get rid of the thing: at the same time, we'd need to nationalize election administration. If we didn't, it would be much easier for states to "cheat" and exaggerate their voting power by claiming higher voter turnout than what actually happened.

Think of it like a badly-designed old dataflow that you would love fix, but there are so many dependencies now that it's become a major project.
18 versions later and this bug is still open (1119 days)
The machine in the video was made by iVotronic, not Diebold.

none of these machines are open-source, that's really the important factor

This is the least important factor.
I would like to disagree with Mr.Param who is either being a cynic or trying to be "me-too".
India is aggressively moving away from paper-ballot voting to EVM's. In our last general elections, a million electronic voting machines (EVM's) were used which reduces vote-rigging, ballot capture etc. In maybe 5 years, we will be completely rid of paper-ballots.

For further read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_voting_machines

India also has option called "None of the Above" as a voting option, which is extremely democratic.
Upverter Gets Your Circuits Laid
The short answer is you can buy votes then. If you can prove to me who you voted for, I'll give you $5 or whatever.
In the state of Washington (not to be confused with the city of Washington; our largest city is Seattle), everyone gets the chance to vote in the privacy of their own home even weeks before the election and mail in their ballot, or drop it in a drop box. There is an outer envelope one signs and an inner privacy envelope which is left unopened until the count starts. It's possible that there are hidden shenanigans, but if there are observers for the vote-counting process I can't imagine any problems.

I have no idea why other states don't do this.
Don't forget buying a separate facility to store your extra hard drives and your time regularly doing full restoration tests to confirm that you haven't been hit by silent bitrot.
Even GHC's (Haskell) REPL executes side-effects.
If you are going to rig an election machine you'd do it on the backend, not on the front end where people can see an incorrect choice.
Uh, it's pretty clear that you didn't watch the video and didn't read the article.

Don't troll. You are bad at it.
So very much this. Voting systems and elections in the US are heavily gamed, mostly legally but always unethically. The reason why the US does not have smooth voting is because the incentive for elected officials isn't in getting people voting, but enabling voting for those with interests aligned with their own. When it comes to actual voters, some of them see nothing wrong with policies that are highly discriminatory, and that includes how elections and voting is conducted.
> why would an attacker bother to actually show a user they were being manipulated?

Because the person who wishes to tamper with the outcome of the election only has access to (or, very likely, skillz to modify) the calibration template (which has to be reconfigured each election, hence is modified by more people), not to the entire source code and tool chain of the voting machine. Most attacks are not gigantic conspiracies with unlimited resources.
Bugs stomped in Chrome 23 stable
What show was it that discussed what would happen with a large number of very smart engineers and voting? I recall a TV show back in the day that basically said "We don't use electronic voting because it's too easy to game". I think it was one of the episodes of Sliders.
Yes! People are surprised when I hear that I, as a software developer, am utterly opposed to touch-screen voting and internet voting.

California's system strikes me as ideal. Ballots are on paper but are machine-countable. Voters feed the ballots into the counting machines themselves, which verify that the ballot is valid (e.g., voted for exactly one person per race). If your ballot gets counted properly, the machine makes a happy little noise.

I like this because it has the fast results of electronic voting, but it has a proper paper trail and minimum mystery about the counting process.
What problem do electronic voting machines actually solve? The US didn't seem to have problems counting millions of paper ballots (save for some hanging chads) until the "solution" of electronic voting machines appeared.
Calibration!! Really?? Any software/hardware developer here worth his/her salt would agree that can't be it. Let's see what could have happened: 1) The Y axis of the screen was maladjusted 2) Touch Sensitivity of the screen was reduced due to incorrect settings 3) Touch area had hair/dust/oil on it. But if you read the voter's story it happened only for Obama's field. Don't they have independent watchdogs looking after this thing in United States? If shit like this went down in India, the Election Commission would have simply closed the whole damn polling booth(for the day) and arrange separate polling on a later day with extra scrutiny and security.
KDE Ships November Updates to Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform
Doing a DIY wireless Zigbee Network with 2 XBees and an Arduino Nano in no time
What about, e.g. taking a video of your vote as the original Reddit poster did?

I think this verification may already be a reality. The alternative is to disallow any form of verification, as with the Reddit poster, but then we lose the ability to perform checks on the voting procedure, and would never have known about this current anomaly.

What's missing, though, is the proof that who you voted for is who the vote was internally counted for.

Due to anonymity you can't individually prove a confirmation number belongs to you - you could have found one on the street or made up some random number, but if 10000 people claim that their initial vote does not match the confirmed vote, it's worth looking into more carefully.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, folks. If you're in the U.S. I highly reccomend being a poll worker in a contentious district in a swing state if you ever get the chance. I was in a suburb of Denver last election and saw all kinds of shenanigans, from people pulling fire alarms to clear out the polling places to people walking aaround with laptops "checking voter registration" (actually just lying to people to get them to go home).

There was also this, a few weeks ago: http://www.nationalmemo.com/man-connected-to-virginia-gop-ar...

The fact is that there is a concerted, coordinated effort to tamper with the vote every single election. I have no way of knowing whether this specific incident was malicious, but I sure wouldn't be surprised if it was.
If you use "number of issues that come up" as a measure of how bad things are, size is absolutely an issue. One-in-a-million errors will occur 300 times if everyone votes.
I'm hiring a personal iOS prototyper
This is part of my job, buying from the side of large companies so I will provide some input.

This is talking from the direction of actively engaging a large business and selling to them. I work on the side of large business actively choosing which startups we want to work with.

"Lesson 1: In larger organizations there are multiple individuals with separate motivations involved in the buying process "

Without question this is important. I am sort of a gatekeeper in the process. It's my job to validate the companies that are seen by the real decision makers (not me). I am the technical grunt in front of the process allowing the C level decision makers to only make good decisions no matter what they decide to do.

With me, you can discuss tech on a geek level, and I'm most comfortable and at home.

To my C levels, you better be high level and respectful. We've lost the ability to work with several startups simply because they weren't able to discuss on a C level.

If you are a founder and can't discuss on a C level, hire someone who can. You could lose a tremendous level of money and momentum simply because you have no idea how to talk to someone who leads a large business.
Lets not be so quick to forget that the term hacker originally meant... someone messing around with other people's computer systems without their permission before it took on the benign connotation among computer enthusiasts[1]. The antedating of the term hacker is really quite something.

[1] http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0306B&...
Resque vs Sidekiq, Threading vs Forking
FWIW:
Using a cell phone to take video in polling places in most states is prohibited, and in general "frowned upon" in others. I would not be surprised if he simply took a video as quickly as he could and then left. I agree it would have been a more believable incident if there was more video.

Based on the reddit story, I think this was Central PA, which definitely falls into the "not allowed to take video" category.

http://www.citmedialaw.org/state-law-documenting-vote-2012#P...
>Edit: here you go, same problem that affects Romney votes on another machine http://www.cbs42.com/content/localnews/story/Voting-machines....

I think the difference here is that there is absolute proof that it wasn't end user error whereas with the story you linked to there were no videos or any other demonstrations.
Because having groups of random, untrained people squinting at dangling chads is less error-prone?

What system, in your opinion, would minimize error?
Increasing access to voting isn't a form of voting manipulation, because the whole point of voting is to provide voting opportunities to every person who is eligible to vote.
What makes a free trial work (or not)
Americans tend to have this unbelievably naive idea that there's no high-level organized or institutional crime in their country.
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0306B&...
In the particular case of roads, the issue is actually that America does not have enough people for it's size. The population density in many states is too poor to support, at tax rates that americans are willing to tolerate, the amount of road that is necessary.

See: the disparity between road quality in Maryland (good density) and Pennsylvania (poor density). (or, to correct for climate, compare Pennsylvania with New York).
Hey Intropic, Zenbox co-founder here. Zenbox is free for showing profiles (up to 150 per day) from nearly all services, except for Salesforce.

Premium accounts let you update the profiles (Mailchimp, Salesforce, etc.), subscribe/unsubscribe customers from mailing lists (Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Mad Mimi, etc.), refund charges (Stripe). It's $29/month, with a discount up to $19/month when paying for a year up-front.

We haven't published the pricing information yet (it'll be up this week), but that's what we've been releasing to our beta users so far.

Happy to answer any questions!
Photo series of Superstorm Sandy damage: Staten Island, Lower Manhattan
Can someone explain me like a five year old (european) how it is that...

You put a man on the moon, flew the space shuttle, have a rover sending holiday pics from mars, not to mention, your entire computer industrie....

But you can not make or agree a voting machine that actually works beyond reasonable doubt?!
1. If a side channel attack in a noisy environment is the best attack, you're way ahead of most of the computing world

2. This is why cloud providers offer the option of dedicated provisioning where you can use the cloud APIs but ensure that your VMs run on hosts dedicated to your organization.
I would also like to see the "Approval Voting" system being implement. It would make sure the politician that most people agree with the most, will get elected. It would also make it a lot easier for a 3rd party candidate to be elected president.

For example, if 45% would vote for Obama (Democrats), 45% would vote for Romney (Republicans), and each of those 2 factions would also vote for Gary Johnson in proportion of 30% each (out of total voters), then it would be Gary Johnson who would win the election, because he would have the support of 60% of the population, rather than 45% for Obama and 45% for Romney.

The reason this result would be more satisfactory for a larger portion of voters, is because more people actually approved of this candidate from both sides, instead of 45% approving Obama and absolutely hating Romney as a president, or 45% approving of Romney and absolutely hating Obama.

The winner would be the candidate that is liked or approved by the largest portion of the population, which leads to higher satisfaction for the voters after the election.

http://electology.org/approval-voting

AV vs IRV (for those wanting to see the IRV system being applied):

http://electology.org/approval-voting-vs-irv/
How do you get rid of the delays in Zigbee communication with XBees?
Astronaut Worries About Skills of Today’s Pilots
I was in a place like that straight out of college as well. It was for a trade magazine. The job description had lots of programming requirements but it turned out to be a basic "Webmaster" type job that only really required basic HTML/CSS knowledge to take the magazine editorial content, format it for the web, and put it up on the website. I was out of there within 6 months. If you have any programming credentials whatsoever, it should be fairly easy to plan your escape route.
A simple way to speed up pjax/Turbolinks on Rails
It's 2012. You can buy touch screens that don't need constant "calibration". These machines are using 1980s caliber technology when this was a constant problem. The last touch screen I've worked with that had this issue was CRT-based.

All these machines should do, presuming you need machines at all, is print out a receipt with the vote clearly indicated so that it can be deposited in a traditional ballot box. Leaving the tabulation a "trade secret" is really not a good idea.
Your mistake is in thinking that Americans want a well-functioning, well-funded government. Some do, but a substantial swathe of America is currently, for one reason or another, opposed to that.