skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On-line voting is not impossible, but people tend to see the "I
marked my ballot" part and ignore the rest of the voting ecosystem.

Registering voters implies maintaining a registration DB, and
handling moves, deaths, changes of name, changes of
civil status that may disenfranchise or re-enfranchise a voter.

Preparing ballots, paper or otherwise, implies matching voters to
the appropriate ballot, precinct, or voting center.

Avoiding or invalidating multi-voting (in the same jurisdiction)
implies knowing whether a voter has or has not voted, and keeping
them from voting multiple times.

Counting paper ballots implies accounting for spoiled and unused
ballots and dealing with faint or unintended marks.

Secrecy of ballot implies that nobody else knows or can find out how
a voter actually voted (currently unless they show someone a mail-in
ballot before mailing it.)

Imagine the result of a smartphone app that wrapped around a voting
app, and offered to pay voters $50 to vote for or against a
candidate or ballot measure - even if the payoff app completely failed to
work, just the purported existence of such a tool might cast doubt
on a election result.

Voting online is not a "greenfield" problem - it would have to
subsume a lot of previous experience and knowledge before being
thoroughly trusted by its users.

I would suggest to anyone exploring online voting that they get a
grassroots look at the current process - volunteer to be a elections
clerk (judge, watcher, etc.) at your next local election, and/or
become a voter registrar if your jurisdiction allows citizens to
fill that role.

If you'd rather just web-browse, I can recommend
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avi_Rubin
as a useful and thoughtful source.

PS - my voting preference is that voters mark scannable ballots,
that are scanned immediately in the voter's presence. You get
the persistence of paper, immediate feedback for mismarks or
unscannable ballots, and good reproducibility of count if needed.

Also, if a surge of people arrives at a polling place, paper ballot
marking can be done in parallel, rather than having a bottleneck of a
few (expensive) machines that all voters must use (registration
look-up and ballot scanning are still bottlenecks).
Interesting but: This license does not allow using Pancake for commercial websites. If you want to use Pancake for such sites, please contact support [at] pancakehttp [dot] net
> But Aaron is not trying to discredit Linus' opinion

I think the main point is that: People should think for themselves, and just because someone famous acts a certain way doesn't mean we should follow blindly
Oops. Important distinction.
Nice. I made something like this for reddit called redditrewind: http://www.redditrewind.com
"I like Gnome Shell"

What a roaring pity no one else does.

Seriously, between its broken extensions, eye-candy that slows down performance on anything older than 2 years, and trying to shoe-horn a touchscreen interface into a desktop environment, GNOME Shell looks like the product of a union between a rabid monkey and a an elephant run amok.
IPhone 5 touchscreen glitch discovered by developer
Not necessarily. Use patch mode (or a tool like GitX that does the same job), commit, then stash and run your tests. If it's broken, amend your commit, rinse and repeat. Then push your changes or pop the stash and continue development.
i recently just changed jobs, so i can give a first-hand opinion on this.

firstly, the fact that many companies, after interviewing candidates, don't bother to contact interviewees afterwards is a big problem. it reflects personally on the people who run these companies and hire their workers. if your someone they want, they will kiss your ass to no end, but the second they don't want you, you're treated like a worthless piece of shit.

as i went through the recruitment process, i interviewed with a bunch of companies, from startups to larger, more established companies. i have to say that the situation was a lot more improved than a few years ago. a few years ago, i would talk to companies like ebay, and even getting all the way up to discussing salary, both ebay and the recruiters stopped talking to me abruptly, for unexplained reasons. i was pretty much put off paypal and ebay for those reasons.

this time around, it was mainly the startups that were pretty rude in notifying me that i was no longer being considered.

when i finally decided on a job, i was still in talks with several companies. i was sooo tempted to just stop responding to their emails, but instead i did the right thing and emailed them all personally, telling them that i had accepted another offer. most of the companies responded back congratulating me, and only a single startup didn't bother responding.

i am hopeful that we have turned the corner, and that being professional in one's correspondence, especially during the hiring process, is important.
Cool stuff. We did something similar but for tvs with some other apps. Snapshow.tv

I like the design of your mobile contest lander, looks sharp
The problem is ill-posed: What is the probability of choosing does not describe the choosing process. For example: It turns out that I always choose my 2 points so that the center-of-the-square is never inside the circle, so the probability is exactly 0.

Not the answer that anyone is looking for, but shows the importance of understanding what is asked.
Edit: and learning to specify exactly what you mean when you ask a question. As the saying goes: If you do not learn to write what you mean, then you will have trouble meaning what you write.
I actually don't even need to do this, they just enable immediately. (Version 3.6.1, if that's relevant.)
If you're going to stash anyway, sounds better to use stash -p and run the tests before committing.
This already exists. It's call shopping.
I expect that as memory usage increases, the resulting increase in GC pressure causes the GC to run more often. Most GCs that I know of are designed to have some memory free for the young generation (for fast, cheap allocations) and some memory free in the old generation (so objects can be moved from the young generation to the old generation). Maybe the JVM detects that it's approaching the limits of physical memory and starts GCing more often to avoid running out of space?

EDIT: From rereading the original post it seems more likely that it was approaching the heap size limit set when running the JVM and not a physical memory limit. I would expect the same principle applies, though.
Scala - Diferencia entre VAR y VAL
Analyzing social networks: analysis of the statistics blogosphere (with code)
How do you decide that a country wants to be a democracy?
There is no easy answer to this as well.

Iraq:
A guy you know has a chronic illness and he will suffer more if he doesn't move more instead of just sitting at home. He doesn't think being more active is necessary. Is it proper that you force him to work out every day? (You also make some money if you force him to work out every day)

Mexico:
You put dangerous trash in front of your house and the neighbor's kids use it to hurt each other and also throw it at your kids and sometimes hurt them. Is it proper to do something about that?

There is no right or wrong but I believe some things are obviously less wrong or more right than others.
Interesting article. I'd be interested to know some more about the kit in the bus. Where does the wifi uplink to, for instance?
The Java GC uses a mark and sweep algorithm that has to stop the world to collect the garbage. As the number of items on the heap goes up, there are a higher number of valid pointers (less garbage) and the GC takes a long time to find even a little bit of garbage to clean up. So each GC run takes longer and there are more of them as the heap fills up. Given that the world is stopped during each GC run things take longer and hence the insertion rate is slower.
With each consecutive insert in the collection, the available memory shrinks, the GC detects this, and attempts to free some of it. As long as more memory (the 15GB) can be allocated, this isn't much of a problem. However, at some point there is hardly any memory left: the 15GB is all but allocated, and very little memory can be freed with each run. So the GC runs ever more often, to the point that it starts to slow down the system.

Before you say "well that's stupid", realise that the alternative would throwing an OutOfMemoryError, in which case the JVM would terminate. A slow JVM is better than no JVM.
Or that ;) I just wish my git-GUI of choice (GitX) supported that mode...
Reading this makes me wonder where game value is these days. I suspect that a curated source of 'decent' Android games would be more valuable for the curation than for the actual games. Of course it would not be easy to extract that value. The two avenues would be charge for use, or charge for entry. And either way the authors are going to wonder if they should get a cut if you're making money off their "free" game.
What do people login to do if there's nothing dynamic? To edit the pages?
They were probably thrown off by this page[1], which states that "Work has not yet started on the new Web Audio API in Firefox." :)

[1]https://wiki.mozilla.org/Web_Audio_API
Yahoo's Fantasy Football servers down right before games
The ‘Vibrative’ iPhone Virtual Keyboard Uses Vibration to Detect Typing [video]
The points i.i.d. with respect to Lebesgue measure on the square. Happy?
Show HN: Flash cards from the future (Our Grails48 Hackathon entry)
Singapore is weird, quite autocratic and not that corrupt. Maybe the city state should be seen as a corporation?

I can't give three more counter examples, can you?

(I might add -- the problem with kings are that even if the present one is a genius, you don't know how crazy the next one will be...)
Ask HN: What tool(s) do you use to spec out a software product?
Just wondering if anyone had any great suggestions for any great prototyping / technical specification tools to provide programmers with an accurate spec to work from. Or is the consensus that you need a combination of documents. Be interested to hear other peoples approach at the very start of a project before code has been written.
Well, there is always what happened in Bhutan, which went from an absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy by the King's own initiative (who abdicated after the transition) without any demand for it from the (Bhutanese) people.

Small country though, maybe isn't a good example (they also have lots of ethnic problems with Nepalese that cause disharmony).
The skills needed to manage a large company are almost diametrically opposed to the skills needed to manage a disruptive startup.

I think Jobs was one of those exceedingly rare individuals that could gracefully handle either situation. He was just as dangerous as a startup founder as he was the CEO of a huge corporation.

Forstall apparently was one of Jobs' key players, despite having a huge target on his back where other Apple managers were concerned. I bet that Jobs knew exactly what Forstall's strengths and weaknesses were, and he managed to use Forstall for his strengths while keeping his weaknesses contained. With Jobs' passing, Forstall lost his protection, and Apple lost the person that was effectively able to manage someone like Forstall.
Sounds more like a link bait headline...
Apple may not collapse or be doomed, but it could definitely stagnate and become passé. I once worked with for a Jobs-ish type GM and agree with Lopp's thesis that a leader who can maintain a high level of discord without letting it destroy the organization is much more likely to see brilliant innovation arise.
I disagree. A slow JVM can go on and on and the perception may be that the system is up. I think in this scenario a fail fast is much more interesting, since in a normal system, the fact that the JVM is down would trigger some manual intervention which seems like is needed anyways.
Interesting one.

I would love to see a list of all the Hacker News "meta tools".

I posted my own last week: http://www.HnEasy.com sorts hn all posts and comments by upvotes from the last day... to last 5 years.
Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle! I read it yesterday afternoon. "Science" (i.e. what other people think of it) has a big role in it, but there are a lot of facts in it, too. It's a well-written book that'll leave you thinking for sure..
How to launch Central European startups in the US
That's cool! A had similar idea some time ago, but instead of using the pixel brightness it analyzes the edges in the image and tries to rebuild as mesh, giving a funny "Tron" effect.

It's written in Processing [1] and there's a sample video [2].

[1] https://github.com/hcarvalhoalves/processing-cammesh
[2] http://vimeo.com/8297993
Extensions enable and disable without relogin at least since 3.2.
The article doesn't say what the -Xms was. If you set it to less than Xmx, the VM will increase the memory size only when it's really necessary - it will issue a GC before trying to increase it. A GC on a heap of 100M objects takes a while.

Even when you reach the Xmx the VM will try to GC, and sometimes it can free a bit of memory so it doesn't throw an OOM, insert another 10 items and run the GC again, and so on - as long as you allocate small objects, it can take a while until you see the OOM.
Have you seen HN Notify? http://hnnotify.com/
If I write a site that logs users in, I keep track of them merely by storing their username in a database as well as a cookie value representing that they are logged in, so do they need to accept terms before logging in?
Nobody is blaming Bush (protip: he is not the president any more, and even if he were, the president is not responsible for determining gun laws in Arizona.) However, the fact that a random 18-year old can buy $20,000 of guns in Arizona and just walk out the door is the real cause of the problem. The ATF, by law, can't even set up a database of who bought what gun. I am in favor of gun rights, but this is just ridiculous.

Given that the purpose of F&F was specifically NOT to seize weapons that could be seized - relating the inevitable blowup of F&F to the lower seizures, is, well, you know... gah.

Here's a deep thought for you. If "Fast and Furious" was really the cause of those guns getting to Mexico, then why are guns still getting to Mexico, now that "Fast and Furious" is over? And why did so many of them get there before the operation started?
That one is easy, the profit per kilo, as a percentage of per capita income, is on average staggeringly higher in Mexico. Higher profits mean more contenders which means more fighting.
We did Not get 100,000 downloads for our Windows 8 app
Sure Apple has it's challenges. I'm sure all of us can agree.

However, to me Steve Job's "visionary son" is not Forstall but Ive. Ive embodies the values that Jobs had regarding innovation (not surprisingly he was one of Jobs' best friends and spent the most time with him of all of Apple's executives).

Personally, I think it's possible Ive can be underrated. Sure, people value his hardware design. But can he design software interfaces? Most people would doubt he could. Yet this is the major task Ive is now entrusted with.

I'm not sure if Ive can do software design well, but I wouldn't be against him. I think he's got years of innovation experience and understanding the essence of simplicity and user experience.

I'm hoping Ive can surprise us all, and lead a resurgence in Apple with some killer new devices. I'd love to see him make a watch (or pendant) that connects with your phone but allows you to access key features. Of course there's also the TV we've been waiting for (and the backend services).

I also think Apple could get into household/home devices (ie., the Nest). It could be interesting if Apple bought Nest and expanded into the automated home.

Lastly, this is a far-fetched dream... I'd like Apple to buy Tesla. It would be pocket change for Apple ($3-4 billion market cap, but probably more to buy them). But could open up a decade of huge innovation that Apple pours into cars. Tesla has a great start, and Apple would just get behind them. Imagine iOS integrated in your car. That would be awesome.
Exactly. If there is too many pointers GC becomes very slow.
Voicious: Upcoming videoconference app using WebRTC and Node.js
I am jealous. I want a hockey-stick chart too :)... Thanks for sharing though, I blogged my own numbers as well - see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4770483

spoiler, we did NOT get 100k downloads. not yet at least.

direct link: https://bitly.com/ZaeRY9
Please give me an example where a modern day industry collapses, or is reduced by progress (such as automation), or by a new industry emerging ... and every job lost being replaced by another gainful-employment type job opportunity? Not in 1790, but in 1970-now.

And I don't mean were other industries absorb the unemployed, because they eventually fill up, and later on collapse themselves for various reasons, mostly more efficiency spelling less jobs.

Millions of auto-workers delivering hot pizzas? That's funny.

> We freed up people to staff the front offices of advertisers and entertainment companies and to bring food to our doorstep.

So is that.

At some point you tip over.

The job market (regardless of industry) always ends up reduced to a few specialists and many low paid automatons (people working in fast food for example, or the FoxConn workforce making iPads, etc) or machines ... relatively speaking.

*To counter my argument, I'll admit there is the internet and the printing press example; and all the jobs the internet has created. But is there enough new revolutions to offset the losses due to increasing efficiencies? I don't think so.
Apple can take one of two directions

- focus on data, like google does, by massively investing in siri (they should make forstall in charge)

- focus on design, but expand out of consumer electronics (which will shrink) into cars and robots, like tesla and rethink robotics (tim cook and jony ive are the right people for that)

Their current niche, square screens and possibly google glass is a dead end
More (and sometimes better researched) news on the drug war is available at http://narconews.com
Without a rejection letter you'd have to prove in court that you have been rejected in the first place. I imagine few judges will take such a case, otherwise people would be suing every single company for "rejecting" them by not actively recruiting them.

On the other hand, going silent after there already has been some communication established does not seem to be smart. But I am not a lawyer and there could be some sense in that too.
No, that is not the answer that anyone is looking for.
During a git bisect, you can mark a commit as "skip" which means "this commit is broken, pretend it isn't there".
Go on then, tell me how I can uninstall Facebook and Google Goggles from my Nexus One?

(Slightly tongue-in-cheek - my Nexus One is nothing like as bad as my Galaxy Tab for crapware that comes pre-installed.
Spire - Powerful new number types and numeric abstractions for Scala
The new local: physical and the digital worlds becoming increasingly intertwined
> I would suggest to anyone exploring online voting that they get a grassroots look at the current process...

Exactly.

I've worked as poll judge, poll inspector, poll observer, central count observer. I have yet to work central count, but I have mean colleagues who have.

When I got started on this issue, I had many many misconceptions about election administration. I mark my ballot, drop in the mail, it gets counted. What could be more simple?

Now I know that central count and mail ballot processing is like making sausage. And that electronic voting requires a religious style belief that everything just works.

> Secrecy of ballot implies...

Voter privacy has traditionally meant before and after casting one's ballot. The "before" part is completely ignored by all the proposed online voting systems. Ditto postal balloting (vote by mail).

The Australian Ballot system permits marking one's ballot in private and prevents linking that ballot to the voter during counting. It's the gold standard. We may divine something better. Until then, I'm sticking to what works.

Like you imply, that's paper ballots cast at poll sites read by mark sense style optical scanners.
Considering most places I've worked at in the last couple of years, that would mean that every day was comprised of:

- Trying to get a working computer and/or network account
- Being interrupted every 5 minutes for introductions
- Wondering where the hell to get lunch from around here
- Filling out paperwork
- Reading way too many pages of HR-written 'employee handbooks' and 'acceptable use policies'
- Not being given any actual work until after the first day or so, because everyone knows that the first day is a write-off.
How much is "a few euros" exactly? Because you won't go anywhere without food and shelter, and last time I checked, the cheapest bread was E1.70 and a bus ticket E1.50, and it adds up pretty fast...
While you can often get the medical methadone/heroine programs they are not the norm in Europe. And they always come with the risk of a user falling back to the black market should the need arise. The availability and quantity of drugs is usually heavily restricted and don't allow for any lapses in daily routine or emotional affection. As a result methadone is readily available on the streets. I don't think such programs are a cure-all, merely a first step.

In Europe it does not only depend on the country but also on the city, which programs are available to addicts. The same goes for possession of minor quantities. Rules are highly confusing and it is usually safest to go by: "If you don't know the unspoken rules, try not to break the written ones."
I smell something rotten. Hide a microSD in a cake? If security and customs missed a cake going thru you think they would manage finding it stuck in your shoe?
5 Signs That Your MacBook Battery is Dying
The theme has got the style of 6wunderkinder.com
Hey. I built RewindHN.

I created this for the HN community and I'm very happy to see so many people enjoying it :)

If you have any questions about how I built this or if you'd like to suggest something new, let me know!
I apologize for not getting back to you. That's not cool in general and triple uncool when you've out this much effort into it. I will make sure we write back to all applicants in the future to let them know when we've made a decision (this does some time take a while though, we've taken 4-6 weeks in the past to make a decision, but it will be done).
Apple-HTC ten-year license deal shows Android patent peace is achievable
How would you go about watermarking html & css?
They already let you do that.

1. Download data: http://www.facebook.com/help/131112897028467/
2. Delete account:
http://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674
The Next Game of Economic Chicken: Taxing the Rich
aww you bastard i just figured out sick-beard too! ;)

edit: this rules thank you
thank you, looking into this now
I ran a 3D Photo Booth at the 2012 Pittsburgh Mini Maker Faire back in September. While not nearly as cool as the one in the article, we did scan over 90 people over the course of the day and print out over 40 at the fair with two makerbots.

http://jherrman.com/2012/10/introducing-scanbooth/

We couldn't have scanned so many people without some automation for streamlining the scan process and cleaning up the scans for printing. I posted the rails app we used and automation scripts on github:

https://github.com/jherrm/scanbooth