skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my opinion, this is very obviously a touchscreen calibration issue, probably caused by the use of a crappy (read: cheap) touchscreen in the voting machine.

A lot of people are dismissing the calibration issue because of the "calibration test" the user described performing:

"Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney's name and started tapping very closely together to find the 'active areas'. From the top of Romney's button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama's name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein's button was fine. All other buttons worked fine."

However, this test does does not actually demonstrate anything. With resistive and infrared touchscreens, which are commonly used in kiosks, it is entirely possible to have some subsections of the screen work incorrectly, while the rest works correctly. Therefore the fact that some buttons work fine does not prove that the touchscreen is, in fact, correctly calibrated.

I've done a lot of work with kiosk touchscreens, and the first culprit I thought of when seeing that video was that the touchscreen was miscalibrated. The second culprit I thought of was that the touchscreen itself was faulty.

Resistive and infrared touchscreens are very prone to these types of problems, and I've seen many scenarios similar to this across hundreds of different touchscreens. (Often, just one corner of the screen will go out of wack, while the rest of it works perfectly. I've seen this happen many times.)

The only way to know if the screen was actually correctly calibrated is to re-calibrate the screen and see if the issue persists, and if it does, to replace the touchscreen itself (as it could be faulty, not uncommon among cheap touchscreens either). Neither of these steps was performed by the user, therefore he has no way of concluding that the screen was correctly calibrated. I suspect that once these tests are performed, it will be obvious that the touchscreen is to blame.

There's a lot of outrage here at the idea of the voting machine altering votes, but I think the following quote applies: never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.

The real outrage should be that these voting machines were deployed with such crappy touchscreens built into them (probably to cut costs for the manufacturer).
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actually I am only able to get a 64bit version of lighttable,
can you post the link of the 32bit version?

Edit: It seems I am only able to get the 64bit version, if you remove the 64 from the link it gives you the 32bit version, ie,
http://temp2.kodowa.com.s3.amazonaws.com/playground/bins/Lig...
That's interesting, thank-you for jumping in with a reply.

I don't disagree with pt 1, but feel that multiple regulators or regulatory aggregates can complicate the process and allow a lot of trash in...
At the moment (and I must say I come from Australia so I don't fully understand the intricacies of the FDA, but we have a similar body here; and I am involved in Medicine so that is where this next bit of perspective comes from) having a single body in charge of approved treatments also serves a role of keeping the trash out. By this, I mean alt-med and all the rest of it.

For example, what would stop a total charlatan from coming to market, using all the tricks of personality and promotion that alt-med treatments do today, but in the absence of a single body meant to represent society's best interests to say 'this is fraud', winning the favour of, for example, cancer patients, taking their hard earned, getting good reviews, and then the patients dying?

It's hard enough to stop this kind of thing from happening even now, but in the absence of a single regulator/presence of multiple agencies the scammers can slip through the cracks, their clients die so there aren't any bad reviews, and they build nice houses and piles of money.

I would also hate to be a Doctor in this environment; it is hard enough being a GP in this day and age with Dr Google suggesting treatments and diagnoses to patients and more and more patients presenting with reams of paper fresh from the internet insistent that they have some deadly tropical disease; Under this system we would have patients presenting with serious conditions insisting that they want this treatment over that one because they read a review online saying this or that.

Food for thought anyway. I agree that something needs to be done and think it is a bit of a minefield trying to work out how to strike the right balance of regulation whilst also reducing red tape
Oh, they get reported on (Netherlands). Usually there are four, five polling places in the country where there are problems with voting boxes or ballots. Yes, we have problems, but a) there doesn't seem to be intentional interference, and b) the scale is a few orders of magnitude smaller than in the US.
He makes mention of that in his book. He uses the example of online poker players, which he used to be. He doesn't consider himself great at that either, just better than the hordes of rank idiots that played during the online poker bubble before the feds shut him down. One they were chased away by the various lawsuits, he lost a great deal more of games.

He also says that effort/optimization falls under the Pareto principle, where the last 20% of your optimizations is about 80% of your work, so it's a lot harder to get from being pretty good to world class. But any model that takes into account prior data will get you a hell of a lot of the way there.
This is about recreational, not medicinal use.

Edit: Don't know why this is being downvoted. Medicinal and recreational use are separate issues, with separate arguments for and against each.

To call cannabis prohibition "an attack on science and medicine" is also rather disingenuous. Cannabis may have valid clinical applications, but there are still dangers associated with its use, especially increased risk of psychotic symptoms [1]

Painting the issue as black and white, and conflating arguments for medicinal and recreational use, is not conducive to rational debate.

[1] http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.d738
Wonderful, I'm using it to learn Clojure and work on 4clojure problems.

What I really miss for this purpose is having some kind of live doc feature.
I totally get this. To me, the ability to call your own shots is one of the most underrated perks of any job.
I'm not sure his model adds much in itself, but...

I think he adds tremendous value in his write-ups. He explains what he's doing in pretty good detail, and provides some insight into what he believes it means. If you're seriously into it, you'll find places you disagree with him (same as it works in any other field when people are into it), but even if you're just casually interested you'll come away with some additional understanding. Or at the very least some additional questions of your own.

And he manages to write it in such a way that general audiences can pick up some of it, and come away with the impression that there's a lot more there. Not saying it's not a true impression, just that the fact that they get the impression at all is what matters.
This is beautiful work. By way of comparison, I've recently created Pablo, a very lightweight and expressive JavaScript library for creating and manipulating SVG: http://pablojs.com

Pablo aims to be a thin layer over SVG, is inspired by the APIs for Raphael, jQuery and Underscore, but is only 3KB.
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It's ok Ross, no worries. It was a very crude joke. How's Canada btw? :)
I wrote one circa 2003, and there's an article about it here:

http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/mouse-tracking-with-j...
The Instagram web profile has to be lamest ever.
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Keep in mind, however, that we could not have expected Nate Silver's own model to predict 50/50 states. Given that Nate predicted that there was a 50.3% chance that Florida would go to Obama, the only difference between this being a story of predicting 50/50 states and this being a story of missing at least one state is a coin toss. The reasons his model turned out to be 100% accurate is sheer luck.
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Not all substances need to be legalized. There's no reason for the government to promote the use of drugs, however it should stay out of our personal choices as much as possible.

Borrowing from Portugal's drug policy, decriminalize possession of personal amounts of drugs and focus on rehabilitation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal#Laws_an...
Heck, even if you're a couple of sixty-somethings who grow marijuana and donate large amounts of the profits to charity, you're still going to jail in the UK:

http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/10/19/british-couple-jailed-fo...
I think this has been the case forever. Apple anyone?
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Yea well it can be done with Google analytics but requires some real in-depth knowledge and lots of setting things up. Clicktale (http://www.clicktale.com/) is another one but I don't have any experience with it.

Maybe there are other tools that I don't know of though.
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This was exactly what I was thinking as well. To take the analogy further, computers are still used to a ridiculously large extent to prepare paper documents, and the software has become relatively easy to use with a little training. Similarly, I believe, there could be 3d-shape editors for regular people that make the design process for certain kinds of objects easy (such as, connectors, lego-like blocks etc.)
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Okay, enough with the downvotes. What's wrong with my question? I didn't mean to bash a field about which I know next to nothing. My question is genuine.

Now I do have an idea where trading could be useful. For instance, a good old merchant doing arbitrage and making a profit is pretty useful: that's how different regions can specialize, do better than they otherwise would, and ultimately lift us from hunter-gatherer tribes where 60% males die a violent death, to our civilization now. And money, as evil as it may be perceived, is to date the best organizing medium humanity ever had.

Investors also have their use: by better allocating money among companies, we could hope to give more money to those who are better at converting it to actual wealth.

But.

The OP didn't make a ton of money because his model of the the companies had an edge, but because his model of the behaviour of other traders had an edge. So I fail to see what useful information his trading put into the system. How his actions resulted in better (or worse) allocation of money between companies. How the (very serious) game he was playing was anything but zero sum.

Maybe there's an error in my reasoning. In this case, I'd happily accept downvotes, but please tell me where I have gone wrong. Not understanding why one's post is being scolded is just frustrating. Like failing an exam and being told to have a hard look at oneself. "Yeah, I get that, but what should I look for?"
As someone who thinks the 'war on drugs' is really stupid, I think it's dishonest to compare direct efforts to stop something (no matter how misguided those efforts may be) to a "magic rock". Obviously drug prohibition has stopped someone from acquiring or selling drugs at some point in time who otherwise would have. Of course, that doesn't make it a financially worthwhile or desirable goal.
This is why I'm hesitant to get another tld -- specifically .ly. Great example case.
Rackspace offers a free DNS service, and luckily the new interface is quite usable.
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I find it disturbing that they advertise it with "spying on people".
You are right about wasting time in compiling ports. That is why I like OpenBSD where packages work - similar to that of the Linux world.
This raises some questions for me.
I can't try it out, since I am not in the US, but what is the exact explanation you give in that initial text?

If i receive an SMS that says "Steve would like to send you something. What is your email address?" I might reply because I am happy for Steve to email me things.

However that does not necessarily mean that I want to allow anyone other than Steve to email me from that point forward... would be a nasty surprise if you dont explain this clearly.
Nice work.

The success, though, isn't his specific model. It's that Silver was able to market the idea that using statistical models is better than a table full of talking heads at predicting an outcome. And that a "dead heat" doesn't mean it's a coin flip. In hindsight, it seems almost ludicrous that it hasn't gained greater traction before.

He deserves a ton of credit for championing analytics into pop/political culture, but I'm sure we'll see many more models and a lot more statisticians during the next election, some of which will be better than Silver's models (if he's still doing them). I'm all for people asking to see the data instead of the media sound bites.

To keep this HN relevant: it was the marketing that drove his startup success. The product (the model) isn't quite perfect and an excellent substitute product was created by someone else in very short order (you). But he put together a great blog, grew out his brand, and eventually saw hockey stick growth.
you may find this blog post by Brad Cross helpful. Unfortunately his blog is not active anymore but it's available on waybackmachine
http://web.archive.org/web/20100118082135/http://measuringme...
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"Perfect for those coffee shops that don't have enough power outlets" .. a SNL skit on this would be funny
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Great. Now you can go on https://intrade.com/ , make some bets and clean up.
In USSR jews could go to other universities too (though they were low profile and i think had quotas too, just higher).
I don't understand how it justifies the discrimination.
A strange position to take, I'm guessing you've absorbed it from the media somehow. His machine was in the market enough to trade 4000 times a day (I would suggest passively, or he would have been eaten by the cost of crossing the spread), so he was basically continuously offering a service to the market - an offer to sell and a bid to buy at the price he thought fair.
Do you demand to know what value your local 7-11 provides by selling you milk? The value is that you can buy milk 24 hours a day, so you don't begrudge them the 15c a carton they are making. And they probably charge more than your local supermarket for the convenience too. The dirty thieves.
You came out from under the bridge for that?
You'll be able to get in through funding. Believe me, Startup Act 2.0 isn't Startup Visa Act isn't IDEA Act. There's a whole spectrum of potential implementations of the solution.

I've put together a coalition that's building the next bill. Note that acquisitions aren't taken into account in the current bills. It'll be fixed.

We've been going through some iterations within political space. No more press releases, starting today, game on for startup visa.
Yep, I agree with this. I really built the model for fun, just to see how close it was possible to get with a few hours work.

A lot of forecasting problems have a structure like this one did:

- There is a lot of publically available data, and simple statistical models based on that data give pretty good predictions with very little effort.

- If you're an expert with a lot of time on your hands, you can put a lot of effort into improving the forecasts by 1-2%.

- In the end, it comes down to the effective business use of your model. Nate Silver had an excellent brand around his model.

In fact, I'd wager that he knows his model is more complex than it needs to be, but part of his brand is "rogue genius with a complex model that's far too difficult for mere mortals to understand".
Were you looking at native cocoa text controls or at e.g. Chrome?
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I don't think you're getting the point he's made.
Speed, price and quality will improve dramatically over time (we bought a £90k 3d printer a year ago that now has two subsequent successors). In fact the rate of development is almost scary in turns of depreciation of 3d printers.
This will enable the widespread use of printers. Maybe not in every home, just like cars are not being owned by everyone. But it will come as your issues are only temporary.
Though you have a point in that traditional manufacturing techniques such as cnc milling, moulding etc will still be widely used..
While it's not as extreme as the the situation described in the article, it's still racism. A restaurant isn't allowed to discriminate based on race, why is a university?
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Where did you hear that rumor? I have all but concluded that on my own based on the bizarrely low prices on obama shares on intrade over the past week. It would be very interesting to hear something more than speculation.
My question is this - if I have a background in technology, how can I learn design ?

Any resources, books, etc. ? Or must I suffer by the knowledge that I was born without an inborn sense ?
I'am curious how health insurace companies will react. Would they charge more from people who take marijuana? Would it be legal for them to investigate if someone is cannabies smoker?
You might like the economic sub discipline of "Social Choice Theory"
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> Why do I need to pick someone who poorly represents my views and will probably vote against my interests, when I could easily vote on actual issues.

That's a great idea! In fact, I can see a business opportunity for an enterprising individual (or group of individuals, as it may be) under such a system: one could assemble a team of advisors who would analyse and debate legislation in order to decide on an optimal outcome for the country. Their advice could then be given to paying subscribers, who would vote in accordance with it, and thus pass legislation which benefits the country. If the subscribers disagree with the advisors, then they could subscribe to a different team of advisors after a period of time, and use that team's advice. This way, the subscribers get the benefit of deciding the country's future without the hassle of having to deeply analyse issues each-and-every time a new piece of law comes up. This is especially beneficial if they are not knowledgeable in or care little about a given field, but do not wish to leave legislation of that field to a small, entirely self-selected group of individuals (democracy is about representing the interests of the whole, after all).

Yes, I've got the basics all sorted out. To paraphrase Phil Karlton, the hard part is thinking up a name for the damn thing! I was thinking something edgy and retro like "The Parliament" or perhaps "Congress", but I'm open to other suggestions as well.
If the taxes are too high, the black market and its associated crime returns. This happened with high cigarette taxes a few years back, and the taxes were stepped back down.
Yes, but Windows NT never was popular outside out business.
1) Make the demo link big, first and easy to find. It's the most important part of the page.

2) Failed to work (using first gen iPad).
We do have Prohibition - before, after, and during. Consumption went up during, and back down afterwards. Crime went up during, and back down afterwards.
This may have been because a) Clegg's performance in the first debate led to a lot of polls where LD support was high, but ultimately this support melted away by the election and the history bias kept polls wrong until the last minute, or b) because there were lots of Polly Toynbees telling pollsters "I'm voting lib dem" to make sure they were in with a chance in the coverage, but actually intending to vote Labour (she actually advocated this tactic of lying to pollsters in the Guardian.)

Either way, it shows that statistical averages of what people say they'll do isn't always a good indicator of what they'll actually do when push comes to shove.

Disclaimer: as a (now rather embarrassed) Lib Dem, I'd quite like these predictions to be more accurate so I don't get my hopes up again.
If you sell a company for $100 million, that's almost $9 million more down the drain. Yes, countries XYZ and have it worse, but that does not necessarily make this a good thing.

In general, tax hikes are bad, because the government caries little responsibility (look how reckless they have been with our budget/deficit to date). Giving more tax money to the govt. is like giving a loan to someone with a horrible credit score.

Also, this technology agenda is horrible. It is not the government's job gamble tax-payer money on business ventures (even ones as appealing as "green tech") - leave that to VCs and free markets.
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From the article

>> There's arguably never been a worse time to be a mediocre, average or typical employee. For most firms today, mediocrity is a cost to be managed and a burden to be borne, not a potential to cultivate or a resource worthy of serious investment. Indeed, if an app, web service or an outsourcer can deliver 80% of typical or average performance at 35% to 60% of the cost, then why pay for average employees? These days, no organization can afford to pay a premium for mediocrity.<<

The Indian outsourcing and bodyshopping cartels which thrive on mediocrity and cost-arbitrage would actually consider that to be awesome news, for it hints that they will get more work to keep costs low. But what they fail to realize is that another cheaper destination is emerging elsewhere. :) One man's poison is another's pie.
> I don't see the point of a whole 25% tax on top of that.

I would like to point out that a 25% tax on legally produced marijuana is very low. A 500% tax would still be low. Considering the amounts consumed, growing marijuana is really easy and cheap. Without the legislation against it, when grown in volume by professionals it should have a cost per kg nearing that of hydroponic cabbage, or some 1000 times less than it's present street price.
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"You can lose everything overnight with automated trading."

Didn't your father teach you about "Stop orders"

You can't have your algorithm cranking away without supervision. And to be extra sure, lots of testing and LIMITS.

Limit the amount and value of orders.

With stocks, worst case: you lose the face value of stocks in your portfolio

Derivatives: you can lose more, even 'infinite liability' (still, it's constrained by the stock market inertia)
I'm interested to know why you're being downvoted.
Cops, prosecutors, or grand juries use their discretion and judgment and turn a blind eye as necessary. It's really not that complicated as long as people operate in good faith and use common sense.
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