skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are right. Countries scale up linearly just like websites do. How stupid of us to think otherwise.
A novel profiler for Python
Thanks for the reply. I'm actively looking for a new position, I just haven't found one yet.
FTFA:

> So if it took Apple a couple tries to perfect the tablet, shouldn’t we cut Microsoft some slack, too?

> No, we shouldn’t. The first iPad was released in 2010. It may not have been perfect, but it was unquestionably the best tablet of its era. The Surface is hitting the shelves in 2012, when, in addition to Apple’s tablets, you can now get Google’s Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 or one of Amazon’s super-cheap Kindle Fires. Because it was first to market, Apple’s first-generation device had some leeway to miss the mark, but its competitors have little room for error. Anyone who’s considering this tablet will be forced to stack it against the competition, and the Surface doesn’t wear these comparisons well.
Multiplayer Games Using HTML5
How many companies does it take to cover 90% of the electronic vote? Five companies are more difficult, but hardly impossible to manipulate. One company may be easier to audit, on the other hand.
As others have said, this is exactly how you can start buying votes. Pull any book about cryptographic voting off the shelf and this is treated as a design flaw.
Crashes on open for my Mac OS 10.7.2 Anyone else?
Obviously edited b/c of the distinct scene cut between the candidate selection that takes up the first half of the video, and the cast vote button which takes up the second half.

All the commenter was saying was that whoever shot the video didn't share it before first splicing two different shots together.
Ah, true, mine don't light up.
If you want an iPad then go get an iPad. I took a look at the surface at a pop-up store and I'm the technical editor on a surface getting started guide. Surface is not going to be an iPad "killer" but there are some things it does that an iPad just can't because it's really a PC (almost). Here are some things I personally like about Surface: You can use a mouse; print to any printer on your LAN, the keyboard cover is brilliant, xbox integration rocks, you can write apps in HTML5/JavaScript, fine control over user policy and other deep-dive control panel things, because, well... It's (almost) a PC. I'm personally waiting for the Surface Pro, and I'm also thinking the Xbox Surface will be cool. I'm also very critical of the missing pieces, but this comment is a reaction to the opinion in the link from a guy who can only see the surface thru Apple colored lenses.
Criticizing the browser for displaying a blurry image while pinching is unfair. This is standard practice for any browser with off main thread compositing, including Firefox Mobile, Chrome for Android, later releases of desktop Safari, and Mobile Safari, which pioneered the technique.
I don't want politicians to denounce their political parties. Instead, I would rather see an adoption of elements of proportional representation into our political system.

For example, Party List PR[1] in the House of Representatives would provide an avenue for third parties to actually get elected on the national level. This may seem like an extreme example, in that it is highly unlikely to happen any time soon, but it is not an extreme system of voting. The German Bundestag, for example, combines a system of First Past the Post voting and Party List PR to achieve proportional representation in their legislature[2].

Even less extreme would be ditching the Electoral college, and moving to a Single Transferable Vote[3] for presidential elections. At least under these systems you're not "Throwing your vote away" when voting third party.

There is evidence that proportional systems of representation increase voter participation, and voter confidence. I would love to see prominent technologists espousing these sorts of changes.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party-list_proportional_represe...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundestag_(Germany)#Distributio...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote
In Germany we have a multi-party system and it works a little better than in the US but it's not a silver bullet either. After each election, the elected representatives vote for our chancellor (similar to the American president). Because we have so many parties and the two largest parties usually get only 20% to 40% of the vote, they need to form alliances with the smaller parties in order to gain a governing majority.

Sometimes our conservative party will team up with the liberals, sometimes our social democratic party will have to team up with a right-leaning party and sometimes the two big parties will even form an alliance.

This works fairly well, especially because each state government has a different set of governing parties so there's not as much bitterness and more people get to work together. That said, within each office, parties still consider themselves to be either governing or the opposition and fall into opposition mode for a few years, just like they do in the US.
I am more curious what caused the 4 minute mid-day outage a few days ago. It wasn't BGP, since google.com was still up, but all personalization was down, and YouTube was down.
Ok sorry, when I read "early" I thought you meant it the other way around.

I'd still hope the other commenters read that part of the article – the discussion will be a lot more interesting if they do!
you are correct it is ridiculous
http://www.youtube.com/mhfm1?v=OynCgwmD-HM
You also will have gotten rid of the idea that a vote is cast in private. A possible explanation for differences between exit polls and election results is that voters may not want to admit voting for extremist parties, or, conversely, may not want to publicly admit not having voted for party X.
The party lost its mind in general, but there are many decent Republicans who don't associate with the party's more ridiculous ideas. I don't know which party/movement you associate with, but you're doing a poor job of representing it.
@daneilrhodes: you took the words right out of my mouth. I had no idea scaling was so simple.

OP: When has this been used as an excuse for anything that you are apparently deeming as 'sub-standard' here in America? Cite a source please? Gotta be honest, I've never heard that excuse once.

I also had no idea the rest of the world had solved the problem of civics and effective government. Why are you guys keeping it a secret? Care to share?
Yeah, statistically, democrats are smarter than republicans. I must be smarter than average!
> Unit testing is not about finding bugs

Of course it is!

> Mock out all external services and state

... unless those 'external services' are an essential part of you application (e.g. databases).

> Don’t unit-test configuration settings

Unit-test anything that needs to be unit-tested.

> All methods, regardless of visibility, should have appropriate unit tests

Capable of being misunderstood ...

> Aim for each unit test method to perform exactly one assertion

This limitation makes no sense.

> Do not print anything out in unit tests

Arbitrary restriciton.

> Capture results using the XML formatter

But why?

tl;dr Thanks, but I stick to my own tried and proven Unit-test guidelines.
Out of curiosity why aren't you at least on the latest 10.7? Which is 10.7.5
Xbox Surface: Is Microsoft really going to build a 7-inch gaming tablet?
That receipt is actually legally iffy.

In a small community you can keep track of who voted in what order, then look at the receipt and know who voted for who.
most of my msn contacts have also disappeared. And worse, many of their accounts have been taken over by spam bots.
> It's hilarious when Americans use that as an excuse for things being sub-par in their country. I see it all the time for health care, roads, schools etc.

I am simply providing an explanation that statistics indicates that there will be an absolute greater # of issues.

I would also suggest that governing at scale is hard and doesn't seem to scale linearly; much worse, as far as I can guess, based upon my news reading. Things like population density, diversity of industry, diversity of cultures start to play out in a very loud and complicated way. The only person I've met (who I talked about this with) who appreciated the scale of the US immediately was from Russia, which has similar scale issues.
The CEO's of the companies making these voting machines are all die hard Republican supporters, especially Diebold.

Being that none of these machines are open-source, that's really the important factor, the political persuasion of the companies manufacturing the machines.

The essence of democracy is an essential distrust of power, so yes, I'm concerned.
Democrats have tried to increase the length of time early voting happens, increase the hours, and increase the number of voting locations. All of these changes make it easier for people who were on the fence about voting to vote.

They do this because they know that people who might or might not vote are much more likely than not to vote Democratic. Thus adding these people to the vote advantages themselves and disadvantages Republicans.

It is not as nasty as voter suppression, but it is no less a form of vote manipulation.
Have you considered using BCrypt instead of SHA?
If there were one aspect of electronic voting I could change it would be the following: allow electronic votes to be reviewed by each individual at a later date, from two independent organizations. Each vote gets sent to two independent electronic counting organizations, and each let you verify your vote after the election, with an (anonymous) confirmation number issued at voting time.

If enough people cry foul to rule out a large group collectively lying or forgetting their confirmation numbers, fraud would be much easier to establish and localize. Moreover, requiring each independent database of votes to match to within some margin would also decrease the likelihood of fraud by requiring collusion between both organizations.

EDIT: Note that the confirmation number would be issued to you anonymously and sans receipt - there would be no way to prove your vote - you could have found some random confirmation number, and no recourse for a single citizen crying foul. The point, rather, is that if several hundred or thousand individuals noticed that their vote seemed to have changed, the likelihood that they were all making it up or forgetting their confirmation numbers would decrease substantially.
What I Learned in San Francisco
Look, we get it that you have strong political opinions. That's great. Have fun expressing them as well or as poorly as you like. But for many, many reasons-- for example, that this is a technology site, or that this is a site that tries to cultivate a community of thoughtful commentary-- it isn't a good idea to post this kind of thing here.
>here you go, same problem that affects Romney votes on another machine

To be fair it is a claim of a problem affecting Romney by some person which is then refuted by another person (some sort of voting official?). The problem affecting Obama was captured first hand and confirmed as voting machine problem by second source per the Gawker article.

[ Note : I have no dog in this hunt - just pointing out something that I noticed. ]
Nice summary. That's what makes enterprise sales challenging and time consuming and why Steve Blank spends a lot of time in his book explaining how to navigate it. What are some other common objections/challenges you've run into and how have you overcome them?
Most likely it's the difference between capacitive versus resistive screens. If you purchased your phone based on the lowest bidding vendor, I'd bet there be a lot more problems with it too.
I'd rather not post it on this account as it would give away my IRL identity. Thanks for the reply though!
In some ways, one company would be more difficult to audit than multiple companies, as the auditor wouldn't have any frame of reference.

If we are looking at a future with pervasive electronic voting machines from multiple manufacturers, I would insist on having multiple different kinds of machines in each polling place. That way, any meaningful differences between machines would stand out.
Not all touch screens are created equal.

I remember the old Nintendo DS touch screen, which was resistive, required user calibration where you would press on the corners of the screen. If you missed the corners (which, with the relatively thick stylus and the relatively thick bezel on the original DS, wasn't uncommon), the accuracy of your touch positions would be very notably off, to the point that using touch-screen keyboards in some games would be difficult.

Obviously I don't know for sure if this was the exact case with this voting machine, but the point being, some touch screens do require calibration and there is a chance for error. Or, of course, it could simply have been a factory mistake.

Either way, I doubt there's any malice behind this error.
Note that Germany is a federal republic with multiple states just like the USA, where each state has different voting laws. It just happened that our constitutional court declared that all current voting machines are inherently unsafe. This judgement applies to all states of the republic.
Unrelated but I'm replying to this comment so you will hopefully see...

You guys should add a feature to your website for requesting to be added to a mailing list for information on product development, release dates, etc.
Laziness? But if that will get Light Table to work, then I can overcome it.
Counting Election Tweets
Care to elaborate? I love Bootstrap but I look at this and see a design whose creator probably didn't see much benefit to using Bootstrap beyond being part of the Bootstrap ecosystem (i.e. they can clearly create a great design with or without Bootstrap).
This is the first time I've seen Zenbox, it looks really useful but I couldn't find any pricing information.
Definitely not! It's a secret ballot -- you cannot have any way to prove which candidates you voted for.
The threat of Macs switching from x86 to ARM
Right...but the point of the OP was that Microsoft has all of the hindsight of Apple's iPads and the Android tablets, thus it should be held to a higher standard. The OP may be wrong about how good the Surface is, of course, but I think he's right not to give Microsoft a "it's just their first try" a pass.
The video you linked to has no video evidence what you say is 'the same problem' is actually happening. Furthermore, republicans have been public and outspoken about false outrage regarding voter fraud which statistically almost doesn't exist. Then behind closed doors reveal their false outrage is to cover their actual motive, 'to make it harder for minorities to vote'. This is happening all over the country. People care about both sides cheating. The internet loves both candidates, however, we all know it 'reality' that has a liberal bais.
Prior to setting up my automated trading program I’d had 2 years experience as a “manual” day trader. - mom's and pap's 401k?
> How come the result is suddenly so much better? Unfortunately I don't know enough about the technical details to say for sure

And then the author specluates.

It is a given that the OpenGL pipeline is more efficient than Direct3D. That's what is actually being measured here. http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/133824-valve-opengl-is-fas...

In my experience, webGL has some nasty performance gotchas and native, full OpenGL can be much faster still because of instancing, attribute divisors and so on.
UK Ministry of Defence hacked by NullCrew
I'm not really being political. The OP said democrat fraud isn't getting attention on here, I simply pointed out it's more likely republicans would be committing fraud. That is all. I get it that republicans would "feel" offended, but that doesn't counter the likelihood of which party would harbor the unsavoury characters.
Maybe I'm missing something. I don't see why the use of this service would produce an increase in that phenomenon beyond what it is now. I tend to think this would merely swap encrypted versions of commonly-used passwords for the originals.
That's fine, as long as you have an alternative ready that takes the meaning that the old "literally" had when I do want the statement to be taken, er, literally.

If you don't, then it makes a lot of sense to defend literal from non-literal usage.

What's the alternative that I can use and be understood?
Must not be a programmer if you actually believe bugs don't exist.
It makes sense to judge the Surface against the original iPad if the Surface were released in 2010.
But how hard is it to post photos to a custom theme'd tumblr for free? Being able to select which photos from the instagram feed end up on a tumblr page isn't a feature worth $5/month. It's trivial to share photos to both instagram and tumblr
If OP comes from a democracy, I highly doubt they do things like:

- Voter ID to discourage minorities, students, elderly [1]

- "True the Vote", invoking a problem that doesn't exist [2]

- Another article on "True the Vote" [3]

- Blocking voting on the weekend before election [4]

- You don't see lines like this in other developed countries. It's not that they're not reported on because "no one cares", they're not reported on because there aren't any lines. [5]

- Again, you don't see stuff like this on election day outside of the US: [6]

- Thankfully, there are honorable republicans who also call this out, like Conor Friedersdorf: [7]

- And this, it's just... Baffling to people in the rest of the world. [8]

Again, this is unheard of where I live, not because people don't care but because we're not (completely) bamboozled!

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuOT1bRYdK8

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-ball...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/us/politics/groups-like-tr...

[4] http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/sep/21/voting-wron...

[5] http://news.yahoo.com/voting-already-mess-florida-041641182....

[6] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/no-one-i...

[7] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/shame-on...

[8] http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/doral-florida-early-vo...
It's simple statistics. The author was up 4k/day over 120 days. He doesn't say what his daily volatility was, but let's assume 2k (which squares pretty well with his claim that his worst day was a 2k loss).

With a quick bit of R code, we can simulate his PnL over 120 days multiple times, assuming he has no skill, and see what the probability of him being up 4k/day is. I'll use a t-distribution with 3 degrees of freedom, which allows big up and down swings (again, accentuating the effect of luck).

> pnl <- c()
> for (i in 1:1000) pnl[i] <- mean(2000 * rt(120, df=3))
> mean(pnl > 4000)
0.0

That is, there's a zero percent chance that he would have made those returns if he had no skill. And remember that this simulation is overestimating the effect of luck.
It's being used as an excuse right now for the voting...
Yes, You Need Timestamps
the arq3 UI makes it a bit unclear when a glacier backup will happen and for what data. (trying to discern that right now, and I cant!)
The scientists focused specifically on the Xen hypervisor, which is used by services such as EC2.

Are other hypervisors vulnerable to this exploit?
Nice to find someone else who turned the second "e" in their name into a "3"
Electronic voting machines allow for easier customization of text for edge cases, like a need for higher contrast, larger print or another language. A good compromise, I think, would be to have the electronic machines print out a human-readable paper ballot, and that would be counted as ballots used to be. The security/checkability of the old system with the convenience of the electronic interface.
I was not the best civics student.. What is the significance of it being secret? Being able to verify your vote seems like a pretty simple, good thing ( I would think ).
And who regulates the exit pollsters?

Normally I wouldn't worry about this, but if you want to give them power to invalidate an election (or force an "investigation," whatever that means), then you shouldn't just let them run around doing whatever they think is best.

but the odds of him losing are nil, the stats show.

I don't even know what mindset produces this thought. While Nate Silver doesn't think Romney will win, he gives changes that are a hell of a lot bigger than "nil."
But there are very significant issues with the principle of electronic voting:

Ideally, every voter would be able to verify their own vote after the fact via some cryptographic mechanism. But on the other hand, this mechanism should be such that the government (or another individual trying to coerce our voter) would not be able to verify the vote -- an almost contradictory, difficult requirement. I am not aware of such a method being employed in any large-scale election.

In the absence of such a method, you have a heap of problems:

1) How do you make it verifiable for the general public? Even if you accept that the general public will not be able to verify it (bad!), how would you make it verifiable even for experts? It's almost impossible to ensure that the code being run is the one you verified beforehand, especially on such a large scale, so this way is out of the question. (Remember, this is a high-stakes game, so you'd better know that your CPU in fact executes your opcodes correctly...)

2) Electronic voting & tallying opens the door for large-scale manipulation without leaving traces. If you want to remove 10000 paper ballots, you have to somehow get rid of them (with people watching). 10000 votes vanishing in a computer? No problem, just a memory operation, a bystander would never notice it.

Some of this can be dealt with by having the machine print out a paper ballot immediately after voting, and keeping those ballots. Then you're in fact using the relative safety of paper ballot voting to double check the electronic record.
Because it's fun to create stuff, because I'm an entrepreneur at heart, and to make extra money (and maybe one day make this my full time gig).
Federal District Judge Christine Arguello denied the existence of a constitutional right to a secret ballot. http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_21601455/federal-j...
We don't have voting machines exactly for that reason (Germany). There have been cases with voter fraud, but they got solved with recounts.
Yes. Proof of who you voted for is an invitation to vote-buying.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punchscan for an example of one such system which preserves the secret ballot property.
Or just let anyone grab a copy of the database so that any independent organization can host a lookup service so you can verify that your vote went through correctly.
Parties are not the cause, they are the result. A first-past-the-post system like ours will always tend towards a two party system.
True it adds no social value, but it is arguably the ultimate hacker's game :) You can actually add a little social value by placing only orders that increase liquidity; those where someone else "takes out" your standing offer or bid. That and the fact that your profits are taxed as ordinary income in the US for equities at least.
We can use data, like factcheck, to figure it out
http://www.factcheck.org/
And yet, Germany with ~80M seems to do just as well (if not better) than Australia with ~22M, or even New Zealand with ~4.5M.

I didn't say it was easy, but I said it's something that should be in hand
But Microsoft could only think of using the desktop to run office RT. why didn't they make office an app and hide all of the pc bits to the user?
> Why are you guys keeping it a secret? Care to share?

Who's keeping it a secret? Elections Canada policies aren't exactly classified information.