skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nothing, but to make that a practical vote buying scheme I would need to purchase 1,000 votes and maintain a list of the secret codes and then go to the count with this list.

Then, in the presence of all the other candidates and agents, I would have go through my list and check off my secret codes.

Guess what? It would kick off big style and suddenly consent to include my magic ballots would be withdrawn by everybody else - the Returning Officer would make a decision and probably have a word with the polis - who are present at, and supervise the ballot boxes.

Protecting the integrity of the ballot is like securing a computer system. Identify the core vectors of attack and lock them down. So it is about "what is the rate of postal votes?" "are the postal vote samples inline with the end-result?" "what is the turnout? relative to last time and other similar constituencies?" "what is the churn in voter registration?" "is the final turnout consistent with the reported turnout?" "is it easy to buy votes?" "is it easy to register fake voters?".

The core point is not to make fraud hard but to make it visible. Of course the basic 'don't make it easy' steps need to be taken - but after that it is all about 'don't let anybody get away with it'.

The problem on HN is that nobody coming up with suggestions on how to improve the ballot is doing any 'customer discovery' - going out to talk to actual people who stand for election and run elections and who are trying to ensure that the vote is fair. The computer pixie dust being scattered around is fixing non-problems.

BTW it isn't an X it is a St Andrew's cross - St Andrew being the patron saint of truth telling - it means 'I swear by St Andrew that this is my true intent'. The 'kiss' on a letter likewise meaning 'I swear by St Andrew that my love is true'. One of the perks of being Scottish is that our flag stands for truth, love and democracy :)
It is incredibly easy to scrape users from VKontakte.
You probably mean profits not revenue. But the thing about raising taxes is that it opens an opportunity for other countries to benefit from having lower taxes without losing any tax revenue, because global companies will want to be there.

At the end of the day, consumers will benefit from global tax competition ... as long as they stay healthy and young.
AMD dismisses numerous open source developers
Fortan is great for FEM. Companies like Siemens are using millions of LOC of Fortran to virtually crash cars and explode bombs.

Also, Nastran got us to the moon (which is basically Fortran)
You have some great student life there.
I'm 2nd year, full time CS student + working part time(30h/week) as a developer. My day starts at 6.30am and usualy ends at about 1am working/studying all day.

I could only dream about your schedule.
MasterCard Introduces Next Generation ‘Display Card’ Technology
Yeah, I also remember E16.. Seems like Rasterman was the first one who made icons, that represent the content of file, and those transparent window titles and other decorations. And pseudo-transparent ETerm. Now we have all that in Gnome, but back then it was a feeling of going into the right direction.

Nowadays it must be a great product, because it was made with vision, for themselves, re-implementing cleanly and consistently all the layers from the very foundation, with attention to every detail. These are landmarks of a remarkable opensource product.

Someday I will replace my Gnome.)
Ahh, good point, exactly (and wow and having no hint of sarcasm as that is blindingly obvious now). Dropbox has this behaviour by default, yes. MacBook Air owners with piddling hard discs (me) may use it as a cloud only store by messing around in prefs, and then forget that it ever worked any other way. I know this misses the main attraction of Dropbox, but one day Ill have a decent disc and will restore it to its former glory.
Wall Street (among other people) has this belief that Apple products are a temporary fad. Their argument is that at some unspecified point in the future, popular sentiment will do a 180, and the company will fall off the face of the planet like they're the Crocs of the tech world. This completely ignores how the company built itself up - by making high quality products and pairing it with strong customer service. The built-up trust is similar to how you pay a little more to go to your favorite mechanic vs Jiffy Lube.

Incidentally, I think this was a key reason Scott Forstall was let go. His slip ups on Siri and Maps (particularly) annoyed enough customers to the point where brand loyalty was damaged. See how much Jobs stressed the importance of the brand (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugqcXqTEVMA).

This weakness is a great opportunity for other companies, but Microsoft seems to have fumbled a bit with Surface so far (judging by the reviews). Android manufacturers, as usual, release a dozen or so mediocre phones each year alongside their high quality flagship models, which doesn't do much to improve their image. "More wood behind fewer arrows" would certainly mean much stiffer competition for Apple.
Getting the most out of distributed teams
How the Internet of Everything Will Change the World…for the Better
The point is that once there is no legislation to stop it, someone on minimum wage would be able to buy as much weed as he's able to use without making a noticeable dent on his incomes.

A lot of the world, including the country I live in, believes that products that are harmful to the society should be taxed to discourage their use. Harmful products typically include things like alcohol, tobacco, sugary drinks and candy. If marijuana would be legalized, it would certainly fall in that category. (It's important to note that a lot of the people supporting legalization don't think that marijuana is good, it's just that legalization would be immensely less bad than the present situation.)

As such, as I see it, the question of how much tax should marijuana have on it depends mostly on how much it can be taxed while still killing the business of the black market sellers.
I don't claim this as any great insight - but I've been finding using 'sharp' or 'precise' as a description useful instead of 'simple' when talking with clients about UX and UI design.

It doesn't cover quite the same ground as 'simple' - but it seems much easier to talk about. Simple is one of those words that means radically different things to different people. Minimal. Easy. Monotone. Etc.

Folk who liked the OP would probably find the book The Laws Of Simplicity by John Maeda of interest http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/laws-simplicity. It's more a series of extended blog-post style essays around simplicity than it is a unifying framework of laws - but I still found it a thought provoking read. Short too ;-)
Regarding your comment on HTML5 being "laggy", I think you should take a look at https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/11/html5-mythbusting/

Besides, Mozilla is not trying to tie down anyone to it's platform, because the platform is basically the Web, which is open to everyone. There are many things which distinguish it from other platforms like you can host your "apps", which are nothing more than simple websites, on your own site and not necessarily Mozilla's MarketPlace. Mozilla is working hard to reduce the memory footprint and make the apps responsive[1] and by the time it comes out, I think it's going to have a really good performance.

[1] - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=797189
...except that JRuby is 3-100x slower than Java:
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=al...
WebRTC now live on Chrome 23
In the long run we're all dead. I think the stock is still a solid pick, especially if you have a position already, the article acts like the sky is falling because the stock slid a few points.

On the fundamentals it's a very solid business for now. It's interesting to see them still fair well against Android even with ICS which put Google on par. This to me indicates that the smart phone market is much more about brand than features.

I think they've done a great job creating a moat via their brand in the same way that Coke did vis-a-via Pepsi.

If they can get people to put iDevices in stockings like Coke gets people to drink coke at Christmas then it doesn't matter that their rev isn't recurring, just like Coke. If the perception remains that Android is the knock off then I think they will do well.
Well no. Sure, he assumes each individual will find their own best things. But I suspect that if you too have strong opinions about flatware, it can only end in a knife fight.
You must also think cars and SQL are also pure evil?
"use something else" doesn't help if one of the two[1] primary linux toolkits is constantly breaking things in order to bend applications into their branding. That kind of shit bleeds out.

[1]Actually it's worse than one of the two because QT has been so tightly coupled for so long (and I seem to recall some licensing stuff earlier on) GTK is really closer to the primary toolkit for non desktop specific apps.
Help save the cultural heritage of Afghanistan
I'm jumping into this game as an experiment to get khan academy working properly on a Nexus 7.
World Usability Day 2012
Debian provides a well integrated systemd v44. If you really like shiny new stuff (which is legitimate), Fedora would be better.
A small lesson in Scala
It's not about expense, it's about quality: the items he is surrounding himself with should ideally be extremely robust.
"If the future is dead, then today we must summon it and learn how to see it properly"

- Warren Ellis http://t.co/eicOEwEP
I never understood the allure of enlightenment, I always thought XFCE, Fluxbox/blackbox/openbox was a much more aesthetic minimal de. Everytime I saw an enlightenment desktop I thought I was being sent back in the past
possibly relevant discussion: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=140277
SECRET DEATH FILES FOUND
You find it sad that people discovered something through a commercial and wanted to try it?

I don't know why it always has to be this cult of Apple BS. Maybe it just hadn't occurred to a significant number of people that they could use their iPad as a virtual piano until they saw it?

You're finding it sad because you want to find it sad. In reality the explanation is quite reasonable. People saw something cool and wanted to try it. That's real sad alright.
Only when they removed LuaJIT from the shootout, it is dynamic and fast (it was around where Java is in the benchmarks).
Entrepreneur Log  - Day 22
A bit OT, but I sure hope you trolls can resume building Saab cars soon. I understood they're going to be some sort of electric vehicles?
Ran into that recently as well. Grueling.
Maybe you know this, but gtk is not gnome - it's an intermediate dependency on which gnome is built. As such, it's also a very useful tool for building other applications desktop environments, and window managers.

The developers of gnome also have the keys to the gtk project.

One approach for the Gnome and GTK devs would be to consider Gnome as one (albeit very important, but just one) client of GTK among all the other big users of GTK. Instead, they are changing GTK with complete disregard to anything that is not the Gnome.

What's an apt metaphor...

Imagine if the private companies that owned the infrastructure of the internet wanted to charge consumers differentially based on how they used the wire. Now, as owners of the infrastructure, you might say that's totally within their power.

OR you might say, the service that is transmitted by the wire is greater than just the infrastructure underneath it, and you, private company, are under an obligation to provide fair access to all it's uses.

Was that helpful? Probably not - metaphors are lies anyway.

So let's try to explain the emotion part. Gnome devs are saying, "Look we don't know or care about the millions of hours you've put in your software because it's not Gnome."

So,emotions? Yes! This is peoples life work, and projects they have helped make successful are turning their backs on them and apparently completely ignorant of their own audacity. "I don't know what XFCE is." - wtf

I think it's upsetting particularly because it seems like there could be a much more amicable way forward if gnome would consider itself as it is, just one (very important) of the many clients of GTK.

With great power comes great... aww fuck it I use xmonad anyway.
With every month passing it's getting late for Apple to declare its next big thing. The next big thing should have already been here. Thinking about the next product to capture a new market overnight is what Jobs did best. And if Apple fails to find someone good enough to fill that place, it won't crash over night, but slowing decent like a glider plane for the lack of the upper thrust.

After Jobs death, everyone was talking how the company isn't taking any hit from the market. While I was waiting to see two years forward in the future, wondering everyday whether it can come up with new product ideas like Jobs. If it had, then Apple's success was not dependent on Jobs. If it can't then Apple is the new Microsoft-after-Gates.

Right now Apple is increasingly looking like Microsoft.
Apple has many problems now. Android and Windows phones/tablets being a massive one. Android is now 75% of the new phones (as of Q3 of 2012), 41% of the tablet market.

Google is eating Apple's lunch as we speak.

Microsoft is about to take a bite of their pie as well.

Another big problem is - Apple hasn't invented anything in a while. They are riding the old wave, doing only incremental changes. Their OS is super stale and is sooo far behind Android.

They did increase the resolution of the tablets/phones, but they don't manufacture the screens, and so now everyone has high resolution displays.

From my perspective, Apple is done, unless they come up with something new and exciting. They understand it too. That's why we see lawsuits instead of innovation.
I suppose it doesn't matter if you didn't work on similar scaling problems in Google.
hit ^l in nautilus.
That's what he says he did in the related meta post: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/95172/old-problemati...
This isn't really a comment on Java, Ruby, Twitter, Google, or my programming ability. It's a comment about the fact that once you've designed a scalable distributed system, the constant factor runtime isn't so important.

Twitter has clearly engineered a working distributed system (or you would have read stories like "5% of Twitter users lost their tweets when our servers caught on fire last night"), so the fact that they wrote it in Scala or Java is largely irrelevant. They need fewer computers than they would have if they wrote it in Ruby again, and that's not something to discount, but I think it's technically possible to have a full Ruby stack do what Twitter does. And, they would have needed even fewer computers if they used C or C++. So it's clear that Java was a social choice (it had the right books, libraries, and stack of resumes) rather than an absolute must.

Besides, Ruby and Java both make the same C library calls to do I/O. So it all ends up being the same for everything except search, trending tweets, and other cpu-intensive analysis.
My thoughts on managing remote teams. Interested in others' experiences.
> There is no evidence of a further blockbuster launch

There wasn't any evidence preceding previous blockbuster launches either. That's precisely what made them "revolutionary": nobody was anticipating their respective successes. So your argument is a non-starter.
Enlightenment was never supposed to be aesthetically minimal, quite the contrary in fact. When every other WM still had flat menu bars and Windows 95 style start menu's, Enlightenment was full of chrome, graphical effects and elaborate theming facilities. It was really a showcase for making your desktop look good, with minimal hardware requirements.
Bhutan mercurys price
That's the only thing I miss from Nokia: alarm goes no matter if the phone is on or not.
Applying Google Code Search Technology to the Debian archive
Yes I consulted on site that got hacked and thousands on pages with linsk to porn sites created - killed the site dead had to switch to a new domain in the end.
The first answer mentions a couple of time that any token given to the user (for remember-me login or password reset) should be hashed in the database.

Would it be possible to replace the whole storing by signing the token with some private key, so that the validity of the token can be checked without having to compare it to some stored value ?
and the famous tl;dr of that is: "whatever gives the judge an erection".
I took E16, newly installed on my laptop, to a work presentation once. I was really excited to turn the thing on and see everyone's eyes bug out. But I plugged the projector in and it turned out there was some strange compatibility problem. One step forward, two back.
As a little addition I would hope that the can finally get away from the C++ world and build a lot of these new things in rust, but I think rust is not quite at that point jet.
I agree that the sky isn't falling for now and the stock is cheap. But there is a huge difference between a $1 item and an $800 (ex subsidies) item. It's simply a very different share of people's disposable income.
Adobe Reader zero-day vulnerability with modified Blackhole Exploit-Kit
I don't see what about this would fail to be useful to someone who had more work to do . . . That is, the focus should be on the technique to use the available time, not the specific time this person chooses to stop.
What you seem to be forgetting is if you spend the time researching and ensuring you're buying a quality pen or book or utensils. You're also ensuring you don't need to buy another one next week/month/year when the current one breaks or you realise its not suitable.
That's also a bunch of wasted time saved.
Whether or not it equates to the time you spend researching the quality item is probably debatable and likely related to the item itself.
Facebook Wall Poster
I think most smart people will rise to the occasion, if they like their work and feel respected.

Most smart people carries an awful lot of weight in that sentence. And respect can be traded off against liking. Valve is an existence proof that this is a feasible mode of organisation but I would be surprised if it worked with a workforce that was not above average in intelligence, conscientiousness or both.
Adobe Reader zero-day selling for $50k on criminal underground
So, where's the pretty theme? Be advised, I most probably don't like the same stuff that you do.
Funny, the default dual-screen behavior on Xmonad was what sold me on it.
A "relatively close" alien planet that may be habitable
I've tested exactly this last week, for an entire week. Result: I procrastinated like hell. Both in my private life and at my job.
Here is the x reason, in case you're in curious:

Name the Apple-developed app, bundled with iOS or Mac OS X that also uses iAds.

Exactly.
Canadian Copyright Reform In Force: Expanded User Rights Now the Law
Your IQ Doesn't Matter & Other Lessons About Creativity From Children
There are very few universal UX principles -- context almost always matters. The idea of universal UX principles is a holdover from the 80s when the field was still dominated by cognitive psychology approaches to HCI.

Having said that, UX is intended to help users achieve their goals. A/B testing is generally used to achieve business goals. Those two things are not necessarily always aligned.
> Why would the windows manager be a "brand", rather than the distribution? (Red Hat, Ubuntu).

GNOME is not a window manager though. The (default) WM in gnome has been sawfish, metacity, and currently mutter. Various components come and go, but the umbrella that is gnome stays, and the brand it has is pretty much the only defining attribute of it.
Why some social media have explanatory value.
In-depth post about why I believe that some social media sources can be used to predict everyday events and used of insights, while others don't.
If nobody gives points, reads or comments your post it goes down in the list and disappears, it's not a bug, only the good submissions stay in the front page
Yep, the system is quite clever, and of course we're also paying for the buses here in Linköping, driving on the same bio gas
This is a very problematic approach for developers who are looking to commit to a library for years.

In the least, it leads to extremely inefficient resource usage as you have to constantly rewrite everything, or just abandon your app.

So, if we go back in history, what could developers do when choosing their libraries? They would need some kind of assurance that it's not going to change a lot. Perhaps a foundation with rules that require voting and a large majority to change guiding principles and rules.

We need predictability in software development, like we do need in other industries and avenues of life. It is very very valuable in real tangible terms.
Arithmetic operations on numbers are not polymorphic, but polymorphism has nothing to do with static typing per se. You're being confused here by the special treatment the JVM gives to primitives, special treatment that was needed to avoid the boxing/unboxing costs, but that's a separate discussion and note that hidden boxing/unboxing costs can also happen in Scala, which treats numbers as Objects.

Disregarding primitives, the JVM doesn't give a crap about what types you push/pop the stack or what values you return.

invokeDynamic is nothing more than an invokeVirtual or maybe an invokeInterface, with the difference that the actual method lookup logic (specific to the Java language) is overridden by your own logic, otherwise it's subject to the same optimizations that the JVM is able to perform on virtual method calls, like code inlining:

http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~jrose/pres/200910-VMIL.pdf

> ... because the JVM was too statically typed at its core

Nice hand-waving of an argument, by throwing a useless Wikipedia link in there as some kind of appeal to authority.

I can do that too ... the core of the JVM (the HotSpot introduced in 1.4) is actually based on Strongtalk, a Smaltalk implementation that used optional-typing for type-safety, but not for performance:

http://strongtalk.org/ + http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotSpot#History
Does Apple need large market shares? Do they have to sell a phone to everyone? Do they even want to?

Also, your line about Apple not having invented anything makes it pretty obvious that you know next to nothing about Apple’s modus operandi during the last decade. Apple does something really new every five years or so and spends the rest of the time polishing (i.e. making incremental changes).

Apple was also always litigious. The lawsuits don’t have anything to do with anything.

At the moment Apple’s biggest problem is that they can’t make as many iPhone 5s as the market demands. They let massive amounts of money on the table. That’s a problem, however not one that usually indicates a company being doomed.
Does anyone have a good guide, or set of packages, to get this going in Ubuntu?

I have tried a couple of guides and packages already, so please only suggest something if you know it works, I know how to google!
NDT
Durex China's viral marketing: Obama vs Romney
I'd be very interested in following this project if you go ahead with it.

The value would be to identify how Tweets from major corporate and political figures affect related stock prices. For example, how Tweets from @benbernanke affect the trading price of ETF's. The goal would be to try and identify signals that provide statistical significance as well as a lag time from when Tweet was published and stock price reaction. If we can find these arbitrage opportunities we could use an API to auto-trade based on the Tweets...
I have no idea about the political culture in the UK. Is it possible that he just didn't have as much data to work with? In other words, a lot fewer relevant polls to feed into a model?
Free book: Ruby on Rails 3.2 - A Beginner's Guide.