skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Those are good arguments, but are those benefits worth the millions of dollars we spend on these obviously flawed machines? It seems like overkill. Print some ballots with larger print and some in whatever languages are common in your area.

If we do have to use electronic voting machines, I like your idea of it printing a paper ballot rather than tabulating the vote inside the machine.
Functional in the small, OO in the large
#1 is not a problem. The apathetic majority of the popluation not voting makes the votes of others (who are presumably less apathetic) count more.

#3 is the real problem. The Nash equilibrium for FPTP voting favors two strong parties due to strategic voting. Something as simple as approval voting greatly changes this dynamic. I assume that Sergey is aware of this, so I'm not sure what his comments are for.
Having used the HP Touchsmart 2500 (2007 laptop/tablet convertible), I feel the same about the "post-PC" era. Moving my hand from keyboard to screen became more natural than moving from keyboard to touchpad, or keyboard to mouse. At the time, I physically administered rackmount servers through a console with a trackball - it was painful in comparison to the touchscreen.

Ever try using classic windows interface with your bulky fingers? This is why the Touchsmart shipped with a weighted pen-sized stylus, even in models with the passive touchscreen.

How is Office with the Touchpad?
I think I missed the discussions in the thread; how is verifiability (is that a word?) a design flaw?
Exit pollsters should be regulated, I agree, if only to avoid an expensive unnecessary investigation.

The media says that Obama and Romney are neck & neck, because that gets more viewers, which sells the advertisements they depend on. (Every presidential election in your lifetime is guaranteed to be declared a "virtual tie" by the media--you'll hear those exact words every 4 years.) Those who understand stats know (with almost certainty) that it'll be a landslide for Obama in the electoral college.
Depends on what you mean by smarter. Someone who votes Democrat is equally likely to have a college education as a Republican.
> 2. Voting is too hard being on a weekday and involving long waiting times. I would also argue that the long waiting times are symptomatic of (1). Partisan election officials have a vested interest in deterring or encouraging the vote in certain areas;

Since I haven't seen this elsewhere in the tread, there are pretty significant gains to be had for allowing easy early voting. In fact, a number of US states already have significant early voting[1]. This is another simple way to increase participation that people should try to help promote on a local level.

[1] http://wordpress.reed.edu/earlyvoting/commentary/early-votin...
With everyone and their dog carrying around a camera in their pocket by means of a cell phone? Hardly. Anyone interested in selling their vote could easily take a photo of their ballot (with some identifying info added to the photo as well to show it wasn't a copy from a friend) to prove they voted the way they were paid.

Even if this theoretically did increase the chance of vote-buying, I think it's still a worthwhile tradeoff for the massive increase in accountability we get from it.
Seems about the same as having someone watch the order the paper ballots go into the box and then having someone go back through.

Of course, we have ways of securing access to ballot boxes to a reasonable degree, and those ways are also applicable to the paper receipts.
> What about, e.g. taking a video of your vote as the original Reddit poster did?

That'd be a felony in Wisconsin, presumably for that sort of reason. http://www.nbc15.com/home/headlines/Wisconsin_GAB_Is_Felony_...
> Voter ID to discourage minorities, students, elderly

Why would that discourage anyone? In slovenia, you are required by law to carry an ID when you turn 18/get voting rights. So there's really no excuse for anyone to not have an id (or driver's licence).
"The competitor had done all this work by going around the organization, interviewing the stakeholders, putting together presentations and data dockets that addressed their needs. This was work that Richard would have had to do otherwise. Thus, the competitor had helped Richard help him!"

This can actually backfire if it's not done very carefully and tactfully. Reaching out to multiple people in the same organization can also make it appear that you are just blindly going fishing. Those people will triangulate, and they'll talk, and they'll compare notes. You'll need to make very sure that you've actually tailored your pitch and conversations to each of the people you're approaching.

If you're just sending the same, cold-intro email to different folks in the same company, they'll find that out pretty quickly, and you're dead in the water. By the same token, if you've been cultivating a relationship with Person X, and then you reach out to Person Y, Person X might feel that you've circumvented him, or gone over his head, and then you've bred some resentment with him. Instead, try this: if you've made decent headway with X, ask him if he thinks speaking to Y or Z would be a good idea. He may say yes, and actually give you the permission. He may even broker those introductions for you, provided he really believes in your pitch. Or he may point you in a more productive direction, with different people that hadn't occurred to you.

I'm not suggesting that the author is recommending a clumsy, cold approach to multiple parties. Nonetheless, I've seen it done so many times -- both on the buy side and sell side of consulting -- that I feel it bears mentioning. The general advice in the article is sound, but putting it into practice takes a fairly deft touch.
Really, "Gets Your Circuits Laid"?

It's a shame too many of these product announcements subtly discriminate against women, and frequently minorities.

Why not a more descriptive title such as "Upverter Releases Sophisticated Circuit Layout Tool"?

Congratulations to the Upverter team, but try to be more sensitive next time.
It's actually a bit more complicated than that. You get 5% of your data back for free every month but it's prorated at a data transfer rate of (5% of your data)/num days in month = data per day. if you store 1TB you can retrieve 50GB/month = ~1.66GB/day.

If you go over that it's more expensive but they prorate it based on how much free data you get and how fast you were going while you downloaded it.
Isn't denying someone the right to vote a crime?
this is a big deal. from designing to manufacturing, this will help get prototypes off the ground much faster
> What is the significance of it being secret?

So that people can't bribe or blackmail you into voting a particular way.
It's just GL_LINEAR from what I can tell.

My iPhone Simulator is somewhat old though; perhaps they decided to start rendering while your fingers are down on iOS 6 or something. On a recent MBP, however, desktop Safari is just using GL_LINEAR scaling.
>Why doesn't every hacker do this to make extra money?

I wondered the same thing and tried to answer it for myself not that long ago.

In short, it's hard, time-consuming, stressful and costly.

1) Your code has to work going forward. Coming up with something that works in backtesting is easy, doing it moving forward while staying within your risk envelope and considering all the associated costs is hard.

2) Closely related to #1. Whatever you put together is surely going to need plenty adaptation and oversight. It's a very fluid problem, you're just one player among countless others. How much time do you have in the day? Where is your capital coming from? For most people, the source of capital is a job that they probably can't ignore while fiddling with a trading program that would have to be remarkably successful to replace that income.

3) Everything costs money. You need a certain amount of capital to start with and there are all sorts of running costs. From the basic costs of execution, to market data and eventually co-location if you get that far. The fact that the OP kicked off with an amount that's essentially the barest minimum for any kind active trading is exceptional.

4) Can you maintain discipline and continue executing on all of the above while losing money? How many people struggle to simply get up on time, control their desire to check a particular website or to get over and move on from some frustration? Even if there's automation involved, trading will test your mental fortitude.
Exit polls are like a canary in a coal mine. They can show evidence of manipulations that might have happened. If an investigation finds that no such manipulation seems to have occurred, then no harm is done.

Unfortunately current US elections are unauditable because voting machines DO NOT produce any kind of verifiable voting trail. Furthermore the apparent conclusion of the US media is that past discrepancies are evidence that their exit polling is flawed rather than that the voting process is being manipulated. (They are biased to decide that way because accusing the winners of manipulating the vote - even if it is true - pushes them away from the appearance of neutrality that they try to keep.)

Furthermore you can't do exit polling on mail-in ballots. So this potential signal of flawed elections is being lost at the same time that manipulation of elections is becoming even easier.

Personally if polls are overwhelming, and elections are in line with polls, I believe the result. But I believe that there are lots of people trying to slip a thumb on the scales, so if polls are close, I am dubious about the results. I personally believe that current evidence is that the Republicans are more successful in getting their thumbs on the scales, so I'm doubly suspicious when Republicans mysteriously do better than polls indicate they should.

I want us to have elections that I trust. I do not want crappy election machines. I want verifiable paper trails. I want random spot checks. We know how to run better elections than we do. We don't because nobody wants to put the work out. I want us to put the work out.
I question the judgment/intellect of anyone who affiliates with one of the major two parties in the US.

I don't think parties themselves are necessarily a problem, but the US system has converged on a two-party equilibrium that is destructive to the democratic process.
Even taking video is illegal, as that could also be used as evidence of voting for a particular candidate, allowing candidates to buy votes.
Blog system using Nodejs, Express, Mongoose, Markdown and Coffeescript
1. I cannot get even a remote sense for the nature of his risk exposure from looking at his daily returns.
2. ok.
3. The point here is that a systematic bias in his algorithm will expose his trading strategy to the good graces of market fortune (luck) regardless of whether he trades a million, billion or once a day. The source of the bias is irrelevant.
4. did not see where he said that but that very much confirms 'timing' / which in this case I interpret as luck as being at least a contributing factor.
Chrome 23 released
Is a plugin API available yet?
After using SublimeText 2, I want the fuzzy search, the ST2 "Goto Anything" search box, in every IDE I use.
If you don't want to have your vote altered. You can go on https://poutsch.com
The cool thing is that the whole planet can vote there!
In the UK, only 1% of the electorate are members of a political party. Or put another way: "between them the three main parties now have fewer members than the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds"

http://www.economist.com/node/21559901

What happens as party membership continues to decline? At what point does it become farcical?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jul/06/british-democracy-d...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/jul/06/politics...
Mac OSX Hacker News Menu Tab App
Thanks for sharing what I'm sure is a fairly normal experience.

It sounds very similar to the last time I voted (also in a school building), except I never experienced a line longer than, say, 2 persons -- I guess we have more, smaller locations/voter --, and of course there was no computer at the end, you just put your ballot in the box. And there were no people picketing near the location, and nobody thanked me for voting. Well, that's not true, the people inside said thanks (and so did I).

Representatives of all parties are present when the votes are counted (and recounted). We get the results in the evening, 2 or 3 hours after the elections close.

It's not entirely comparable since our ballot is quite simple, two pages with large letters, it takes about a minutes to fill out with two crosses in the right place. From what I understand you often vote on loads of things at the same time and it takes a while to fill out correctly.
I have owned a ton of touch screen devices. None of them were miscalibrated, even after years of use.

I have used a ton of touch screen devices in public. I've encountered quite a few that were miscalibrated.

Public devices put up with abuse that your private devices do not.
Very good points. I actually agree with you on most points. Which why I started my startup.
Although the Augmented Reality part of the 3D models may be fun or interesting, its not particularly useful and may be annoying if you use it often (where did I put that marker paper again?). Seems like a direct interaction with the 3D model with your device would be more useful (they might want to at least provide that option). You lost me at print this first.
My advice? Given bad choices, which seem to abound, vote against the incumbent.

It doesn't matter what your intention when voting is, what matters is, at the end of the day, your vote wil be interpreted as being FOR the non-incumbent rather than against the incumbent.

I would say given bad choices, vote for the independent who is going to lose anyway. They're expected to lose, but people will take notice and say "oh, wow, Joe Somebody was expected to only get 2% of the popular vote, but he ended up with 7%! Will you look at that!" In that case, your vote will be first seen as discontent with the main two choices (because you're making a (let's face it) losing vote) and only second to that, as support for the independent.
No, since they individual papers you shuffle them.

Probably a receipt without a timestamp, and with a paper cutter would work as well.
If you ever used a Palm Pilot, you've seen this sort of calibration issue. Given the state of government procurement, they're likely using that cheaper, crappier tech in most areas.
Chrome 23 Released, 14 vulnerabilities patched
Yes, I have a bit of a grasp on the setup, I just think it's completely insane and not worth the tradeoffs :)

Do you feel it's beneficial for New Hampshire to be in a federal union where it doesn't control its economic policy, central bank issues, or foreign policy, but can ensure it has its way on such issues on who can get married and how you vote in the federal elections, where your votes are ultimately largely meaningless? That seems a bit neither here nor there to me.
There is a user-visible printed receipt that is not shown in the video.
Doing useful things is good.

Doing useless things is bad.

This is not just a startup philosophy; it's a metaphor for life.
Definitely, but the CryptoJS library just seemed more mature than the Javascript BCrypt library I found, so I decided to just repeatedly hash the data to approximate BCrypt's work factor. Thanks!
Two counterpoints:

1) Why are you designing a site specifically for the iPad mini? That seems pointless. Media queries are great and all, but if you want to design specifically for touch then you should just assume a 163ppi, and that will be usable by everyone.

2) iPads typically see "full" or "desktop" websites. And they can scale. If something is too small at the default scale, then zoom in.
Given that

a) the secret ballot was introduced into the US (originally as the "Australian ballot") many years after the ratification of the Constitution
b) no amendment has prescribed it

I find it hard to quarrel with the judge. I do consider the secret ballot an excellent idea, but I don't see it as constitutionally mandated.
Why is "getting laid" discriminatory against women?
Democrats are trying to change the voting rules because they believe that doing so will make the vote come out the way that they want it to.

If you don't call this voting manipulation, what do you call it?

I agree that it is nicer than trying to disenfranchise people, but the intent is the same. And I believe that the people pushing the rule would be doing the opposite if that's what their poll data suggested would be effective. As evidence see the story I linked to above of somebody trying to disenfranchise Florida Republicans by calling them up and telling them that they were ineligible to vote.
No dice. One of the goals is that you can't prove how you voted (i.e. so you can't sell your vote).
Simpsons did it...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBaX9GPSaQ
The "gamed" bit is the essence of the problem. The USA has a winner-take-all two party system and not a parliamentary setup. This simultaneously makes the victory margins razor thin (because the two parties naturally align at about 50% support) and the stakes of the outcome very high.

Where in most of Europe people can just go vote their favorite party and let the legislators figure out the details later, everything in the US is determined on one day.

So the incentives to game the system are immense, which is exactly why you see this kind of "Voter ID" laws to target unwanted demographics, and elaborate GoTV efforts with buses shuttling people around town, etc...

But even in the US, it doesn't have to be that way. Several states (mine among them) have moved to a 100% mail-in ballot system and eliminated in-person polling places.
Microsoft DRM tech uses camera to count heads, check IDs
Clearly, allowing easier access to voting is evil. No, definitely we should make it harder for those least able to afford it....working class people... to take time off from work and stand in line to vote.

/sarcasm
Obligatory reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBaX9GPSaQ#t=18s

I was surprised to see how similar it was.
Oh, absolutely. But whether these things get prosecuted is a highly partisan affair.
iVotronic is the name of the voting Machine, not the company.

In fact, the iVotronic Machines were indeed created by and originally manufactured by Diebold, though it was sold to another company in 2009.
Make sure you open-source the compiler, the firmware, the hardware manufacturing process, the assembly, the drivers, the software that built the compiler, and the software that built the compiler that built the compiler.

Or just operate under the assumption that some of the machines are compromised and make sure you have ways of recognizing faults after-the-fact.
Of course the existing systems take these into consideration. There are a dozen security measures in place here:

1) The software is exactly the same for the whole country (138m voters). All software that runs on it is encrypted and signed, and the box is physically sealed to detect intrusion.

2) You verify your vote before it's committed to disk on the voting machine. See next point.

3) Every ballot box records votes to a flash card that is physically taken to the nearest court house, where a judge is responsible for the equipment that can decrypt, compile and transfer results to the federal system, using a private network. At no point a ballot box is connected to any network or external devices.

4) The equipment is programmed to only function during official voting times, and only after running a test suite and integrity verification

5) At the end of the day each ballot box prints it own vote report, archived locally, and keeps a copy of the results in it's internal flash memory

If you remove 10k votes from one machine, the numbers won't match: every voter is registered, and you have to sign a small declaration if you don't vote - the number of voters is always known beforehand. Voluntary elections like in the US pose an interesting problem, maybe you could require pre-registration?

I think bypassing all the security measures undetected would be one hell of an achievement.
You can't be serious.

More people voting == voter manipulation??!??

I would call that a MORE REPRESENTATIVE democracy.
Agreed. There are a couple of other papers as well.

The problem is they are far too complicated to explain to voters which makes them unlikely to be adopted and unlikely to be trusted. Having a secure vote is obviously the primary goal, but having a vote that people trust is pretty important too.
I care enough about politics to know who I'm voting for but not enough to go out and campaign for the party I'm voting for, are people that are members of a party the people that put up signs in their windows and the like? What is a "member" of the conservative party? Does someone just sign some paper or do they pay money to support the party, or commit to helping campaign?
That assumption is political, and if you don't understand that then you're not a good match for this community.
You could give voters a receipt with the time, machine, and candidate they voted for. Checking for voter fraud would be as simple as comparing some receipts against the voter logs.
This is just my take on it; I don't think there anything wrong with the notion of a political party. It's just a bucket under which like-minded people can group together.

My problem with politics is that politicians seem to be more focused on politics rather than governance. It's the back-stabbing, lying and foul mouthing that I start to detest more and more as I get older.

A lot of young politicians start their career out with a lot ideals and will to chance the world they live in. But then they grow up a little and suddenly they have a young family to look after. Their ideals chance and what comes out of their mouths slowly starts to turn into "blah" simply saying what people want to hear. I.e. politics. Their once good intentions slowly turn into self interest.

I think the first thing that any sane democracy should do is to take away the self interest among politicians. I would say that if someone decides to go into politics that this person can have no ties and interests to the commercial world what so ever. Not sure how this would exactly work in the real world but I think it could do some good to our political system.
http://media.steampowered.com/client/installer/steam.deb

You can login even if you're not in beta and briefly use the client before it quits.
Pat cu saltea 
Saltele, dormitoare, pat, paturi, saltea, scaun, mese, dormitor, dormitor tineret, mobila, canapele din piele, canapele, coltare extensibile, mobila, paturi online, saltele online, scaune online, mese online, dormitor online, dormitoare online, dormitor copii, seturi de canapele online, coltare online
I tried to dismiss the warning and it just deleted the file on me.
I'll keep the response specific to sales objections that a growth stage startups face

Scalability objections: can you scale to our volumes?
Respond with suggestions for a phased roll out. Take your backend expert in to the meeting and present credibility on why you can scale.

Company objections: will you be around for long? What if you get aquihired?

Reiterate vision behind why are doing your startup (hopefully the right reasons). Talk about your investors and the expectations/commitments made.

Control objections: "We are uncomfortable giving up control over this part of our tech stack"

Try to create analogies. Understand other parts of the stack that they have given up control over and why they feel comfortable with those. Feed those expectations back as contractual commitments that you are comfortable making.
KO-Artist "Rumble" Johnson says "I Want to Compete in Four Weight Classes.”
I've also used bumblebee and am generally quite happy with it. But the big drawback of bumblebee over a "proper" implementation is that the rendered frames are copied to the Intel GPU in software. I hope that Dave Airlie's work on hotplug will lead to a better implementation at some point.