skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can anyone tell me what are the precautions the election officers are taking so that this does not happen again?

I also saw Hacking Democracy[1] recently that shows about the 2004 elections.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy
Measuring College Prestige vs. Cost of Enrollment
I agree with it and have implemented it.

After profiling a backfill script which was looking like it was going to take about two weeks to run, I found an area where certain bit-twiddling was being done which was extremely slow in Ruby. I rewrote this section in C, and was able to make this section 1000x faster then the ruby equivalent (this was MRI 1.8.5 several years ago). The total runtime for the script was brought down to about 8 hours (from about 165 TPS to around 7,000 TPS).

Fortunately, I've found that Ruby makes it exceptionally easy to write C extensions, and I often think of reusing C libraries in cases where I'm worried about performance.
... and the Java programmer laughs in the corner (Let's not talk about generics though).
Wild or Farm Raised Fish - 12 unhealthy fish to avoid eating
No, actually, it isn't. You're quoting a piece of marketing material for chrissake. They handle 80% of all Bitcoin TRADE. As in Bitcoin-to-USD-and-vice-versa trades. Not Bitcoin-to-Bitcoin transactions.

You clearly don't have even a basic understanding of how Bitcoin itself works. It's a distributed, peer-to-peer system. That statement is analogous to saying "The Pirate Bay handles over 80% of all Bittorrent traffic." In reality, TPB handles exactly zero actual torrent traffic, and Gox is in no way involved in processing actual bitcoin blockchain transactions.

Like TBP, Gox is a convenient target for people trying to disrupt easy entry into the more robust distributed system that it provides access to. But if you already have bitcoins and simply wish to spend them, Gox could get sucked into a blackhole and it wouldn't affect you any more than a raid on TBP affects your in-progress torrent downloads.
I believe the Paperclip Rails plugin was only used in the Washington DC situation. I wouldn't call it sloppy to use a 3rd party plugin, in many cases, that is actually much better than a "roll your own" solution. Rather, I think the sloppiness here stems from the fact that the exploit in Paperclip had actually been documented previously so the developers should have performed filtering which would have prevented shell injection in file uploads. It does seem that overall the developers could have done a much better job, but it's also very difficult to build such a piece of software without a massive team and constant testing with realistic deployment (mostly due to the security requirement, any unaccounted for vulnerability could lead to the downfall of an entire election).

To quickly comment on the other paper, it seems that it is just as much a political commentary as a case study on EVMs (electronic voting machines). It appears likely that a corrupt government may have intentionally made the voting system "hackable" so that elections could be manipulated.
There are probably easier ways for the US gov to break bitcoin. A 51% attack on the bitcoin network (which requires a lot of computing power), would allow you to transfer all the bitcoins, would be much more crippling than "oh a website went down".
Why would the government have your private key? All they need is your public one.
Nobody's mentioned it, but their competitors would be the big obvious winners. I don't know if I think they are the likely culprits, but Mt Gox has a major network advantage right now over its competitors which is surely being drained by these attacks.
If you're like me and read comments before you read the post, then I urge you to take a look at this how-to. Not only is it well written and informative but it makes fairly complicated concepts easy to understand. If you like the idea of writing drivers and want that kind of control over hardware but don't have a clue where to start, this is pretty much it.
Does this stop multiple votes by same person? Votes by imaginary people? Does this stop keeping your secret prime number but discarding or changing your vote?

Super easy, you should go shopping.
If a major state wanted to 'do something' about a website, to the extent that they were happy to break the law, I don't think it would look like this.
I think you meant "everybody can check if their prime has been counted".

Unless you know how to use this huge product of primes to verify that votes have been counted correctly.
Please don't spam comments from a bot.
A Primer on IPv4, IPv6 and Transition
you'd prefer to sit in your armchair and stroke them gently?
The Church tried its best to lower the population's average IQ by encouraging the smartest boys to become priests.

For ostensibly different reasons now we've got do-gooders doing exactly the same damned thing to us.
It doesn't make it any less relevant, people post Wikipedia pages, irrelevant news stories meant to make you "awww" on here, etc, at least this not only provides technical insight but is also relevant to the normal content on HN.
That seems to be based just on looking at the percentages of the four major ethnic groups (white, hispanic, black, asian). The study doesn't look at other axes of diversity, like nationality, language, etc.

I lived in Atlanta for a long time, which is very "diverse" in the sense that there are large numbers of each of whites, blacks, and hispanics. But it was nothing like New York where you had viable communities of say Trinidadians versus Jamaicans, etc.
Swype, Fleksy, and other "keyboards" thinking about Glass, Leap, and Apple
Go try to buy some ram for a 386. Let me know how much it costs.
yes, please. :)
EFF Moves to Quash Subpoena in Copyright Troll’s Retaliatory Lawsuit
Chrome for Android supports web workers
yes :)

at least until i need a house or something expensive.
What are the advantages of this over say a hosted jabber or lync system?

also what authentication options are available I can't seem to find a mention on the site
once set up with the system you could type Tip [HN USERNAME] [AMOUNT] and so it would be
You don't need to use Decimals. When you find all square roots of fair and square numbers, don't cache them but their squares (ie, the fair and square numbers themselves).

Then for each of the 1000 inputs, you run through the set of 46k fair and square numbers, counting how many are between A and B. no square roots required.
Japanese police ask ISPs to start blocking Tor
That would reduce the number of HTTP requests to one (but would also have the side effect of pulling in ALL of the different sized files)
Actually this is a trivial problem to solve (as an engineer who knows a tad bit of cryptography).
Ken Rockwell says "It's not hard, just use what looks good"[1], but to a colorblind photographer such as myself, that's not as easy as it sounds!

I do all my WB in post production. For this reason, it helps a lot to have a calibrated monitor and to shoot in the RAW format (WB isn't 'baked in' to the image, unlike JPEG, so you have far more control).

It also helps to have a reference point in your image. Either someone wearing a white article of clothing, or you can use a grey card held up in an extra shot.

White balance is used to correct the overall color in the photo such that color cast is removed so that neutral tones (white/grey/black) from the scene (or at least the focal point) appear to be neutral in the image. This increases the contrast between colors in the image--which can reveal details that couldn't be seen--and also makes the photo appear more realistic.

[1] http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/changewhitebalance.htm
You can use the 1st column for numbering the steps
(Bear in mind that I don't know whether you're anything to do with the project, so I might be speaking out of turn!)

I'm assuming that the two figures in the top-right, being so closely related, are 'cached' in tandem: 732 backers, $2,569.56. 732 * 5 = 3660. 3660 - apple tax @ 30% = 2562. That gives $7.56 worth of 'top-ups' (no, I can't explain why that's such an odd number, unless the apple tax for in-app purchases isn't exactly 30%)
Very nice over all. Some parts definitely need some polish, though. I get what you're going for with the player-piano type dots crossing the line, but I really couldn't tell what was going on the first few times I brought it up. It was just too busy with the current line of code in it's own highlighted box and the line and the dots. I also accidentally clicked one of the numbers and didn't know why all the dots and stuff wouldn't get off the screen.
My experience with GCJ has been that raw execution speed almost never matters as long as you have the right algorithm.

In the case of the OP, for example a trivial optimization(the kind you do without even thinking in these competitions) would've brought his execution time down 10000x. Basically, you are asked about the number of "fair and square" numbers in a certain range, over and over again, in 10000 different cases. He could have just taken his solution, pre-generated all those numbers once and then ran all those test cases by counting in that pregenerated list, instead of generating it for every single test case(all 10^5 of them). It turns out, that in the whole span of 1->10^14 there is only 39 such numbers and it would've taken his program probably less than a minute to generate all of them(I'm being generous here, since it ran 10^5 test cases in 53min).

In fact, if you read the problem analysis later provided by google you will see that in fact you were expected to make this optimization to solve the problem. The fact that C-small had 100 test cases, C-large-1 had 10^5 and C-large-2 had 100 should've been a strong hint that C-large-1 required some pre-caching across test cases.
Best video tutorials I've seen on AngularJS yet: http://egghead.io -- find directives confusing? watch a couple two minute videos, and it'll fall into place.
see how it works on http://www.reddit.com/r/bitcointip

basically, a bot is a user on forum, you send it some coins. it then monitors your comments, and if you say "tip user XX with YY amount", it sends the coins to that user for redeeming.
If having functional and widespread public transport reduces road casualties, couldn't you say that road casualties are indeed preventable by having usable public transport?
Remembering a Failed Revolution
I don't mean to be negative, but this is hardly a 'UX analysis.' All three "insights" -- ability to have a 'hidden identity', firehose approach to content, and follower count as a valued metric -- are also applicable to Twitter.

I'd argue a much more interesting look at Tumblr would take into account:

- how corporate tumblrs are incredibly effective compared to often-terrible corporate Twitters (part of this is sort of predestination: if a person is smart/savvy enough to have a Tumblr, he'll probably have a higher level of social media acumen overall)

- the theming system of tumblr. before tumblr became large enough that it's userbase was attractive on its own merits, the customizability was a huge selling point, and attracted the graphic/web vertical to contribute both as developers and users

- the overall shift of tumblr from production to consumption, with stuff like the in-dashboard compose form and the relatively new emphasis on reblogging
not trying to be rude or to troll the author, but how does a post about a personal acronym make it to the front page? HN's little mysteries :)

now just waiting for those downvotes...
Why not 1/10e100? Or even less? Go's library support is quite nice already and it's growing really fast.
exactly.
so you reckon it's a good idea.
would you use it?
How Hipmunk saved me from an agonizing day of travel
I starting answering emails shortly without needing to see VSRE because I'm warm enough on the first email. After that, it is all short answers unless I have a reason to do otherwise.
I doubt that a definitive choice is possible between native iOS and HTML5 when an individual developer wishes to adopt only one of these. So I turn to a heuristic that I call What Would Matt Might Do?
http://matt.might.net/articles/how-to-native-iphone-ipad-app...
No I'd prefer to stroke it hard and fast!

Wait we're not talking about porn? Awkward...
No, it also does not cure cancer and does not ensure the world peace. It only ensures that one can prove they voted and makes re-counting possible if needed.
i see, but i imagine that would get you banned for spamming around here :\
I'm not sure if I would use it to be honest, I barely have money for myself, it seems it would be foolish to give it away to other people, even for an outstanding post.

The only occasion I could think of where I would consider it would be if a respected HN user was in some kind of trouble and only short term money could help - living in the UK a transfer to the US is slow and expensive - but the circumstances would need to be exceptional.
I think that you are taking this a bit too seriously.

I believe it's better read merely as food for thought, not as a philosophical treatise.
Please do not deploy this unless you do it in a way that does not leave a trace.

In other words, if you do this in such a way that people who don't care about this can't even tell that it's going on, that's fine. If you have to interact with the HN interface, e.g., by leaving comments, that will become incredibly annoying.

How could you do it without leaving comments? Easy. People who care enough could leave their public BTC address in their profile and install a browser extension that allows for your tip trigger mechanism to be something other than comments. The browser extension could indicate which users can or cannot receive a tip based on a cached scrape of their profile indicating whether or not they have a public BTC address.
> Go does't have 1/100000 the amount of libraries and support that Ruby or C does.

That's what they used to say about Java...
You can use LaTeX (a typesetting language) together with a version control system. You could split up your document across multiple files and have a main document which references all these subdocuments. I've been using LaTeX since I started university to write all my reports, and I've never had to deal with infuriating Word formatting problems and inconsistencies ever again.

For example, check out http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Tables to see just how easy it is to clearly define exactly what you want!

Your use case sounds perfect for LaTeX!
I like this idea, but I wonder about the phrasing. I wouldn't want my more... loquacious colleagues to misinterpret it as an imperative ("please do not send me a wall of text").
Yes, I could've done that, but my code from C-large-1 already use sqrt() on the bounds of the range and I never thought to change that. Since I was generating the roots instead of the full numbers it seemed natural to iterate over those. If I had thought there might be a problem with sqrt() I might've done that. However, it just never occurred to me. I just ran my C-large-2 solution against C-large-1 and got a correct answer so I assumed I hadn't made mistakes. I only found out about this after the competition was over. Oh well, this was just a qualification round anyway :)
That's a ridiculous set of alternatives.
Care to share your thoughts on my idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5586480 ?
Couldn't someone implement a Ruby CLANG dynamic runtime recompiler?
I thank you for the feedback and the great insight but I'm not terribly sure how I miss your point? The first point discusses how the users are able to shed their exterior, show who they truly feel they are, and that it's not possible to do this on Facebook or Google+. Sure, I didn't paint it in the possibly-self-destructive sense you did but I thought the point was conveyed? I'd love to hear how you think I could've done better! This is my first time having the HN community notice something I've done and I deeply value the community's (usually very intelligent) input!
Preview compiled code (e.g. CoffeeScript, TypeScript) in sublime text editor
> I only used the software once, a few years ago. I never logged into anything, it never required internet access, it never frequently updated and it never required a reboot.

They changed the software package literally less than a week after i bought the DeathAdder. Previously there was a specific 'DeathAdder' utility which, as you said, didn't require any online junk. But they completely removed it from existence once their port of the Windows software left beta or whatever.

I did try installing a copy of it that i had saved from before, but it seems that the act of installing the new software somehow broke the ability to use the old one, and i didn't want to spend hours fucking with some mouse driver.

> You realise you don't need the software right? You can use the mouse perfectly without it.

No, you can't. Or i can't, anyway. The default tracking is unusable to me (i like it much slower and smoother-scaling than most people seem to), and OS X's tracking slider didn't help. The only way to make it even tolerable was to use the software. Additionally, the buttons would be recognised incorrectly unless you told the software what you wanted them to behave as.

> I have never experienced this problem. I don't know what you're talking about.

Obviously i was being facetious, i'm sure it was actually one line per 'click' or whatever. Each click had far too much travel for that to be usable. Especially in comparison to the Magic Mouse and Mighty Mouse, with which you can near-instantaneously flick to the bottom of a long Web page.

If you didn't experience that, i guess i don't know what to tell you.
Don't take my comment to be against the idea, it's great to be honest, I'm simply not the target market - however there are quite a few more wealthy, entrepreneur and silicon valley types on here who wouldn't miss a few hundred dollars in tipping.

The idea is definitely a good niche and if I simply had more disposable income I would use it - don't let me refusal discredit it in any way.
Successful Launch for Antares
Exploring the Pharma Industry and What we found
DigitalOcean's site and servers very slow. Can't SSH.
nnnnnnope
Then you probably shouldn't use it with them. After all, that is exactly what it's for.... OTOH, those folks probably won't pay attention, or may even protest, "it was a short reply!"
The way it's written almost makes me believe that kernel modules are that easy to write.
I checked from 3rd-party server and can't SSH also, so I assume it's not my local problem.

EDIT. Others confirmed it on Twitter, but it started working normally now.

EDIT2. The slowness returned.
Well, that's coming. Give it a few months. There seem to be a number of projects in this space, but I guess it won't be legit for some people until an LMAX Disruptor is written to do BTC FOREX trading.
Some people don't vote, you can't assume than if the number of votes is lower than the number of citizens then there was no fraud.

Furthermore, voters shouldn't be able to prove how they voted - otherwise somebody could pay people who can prove having voted for him or threaten people who can't.
I have tried it. My MSc dissertation required a lot of computation (weeks of runtime after I'd rewritten critical portions in C++), and I'd do it that way again.

For many types of problems, putting the data into an efficient format before passing it to your C/C++ code is trivial in terms of both difficulty and time spent.

I prototyped everything in Ruby, profiled, and then rewrote a handful of the critical parts in C and C++.
Oh Dear Lord Picture Element Needs To Be Baked Into Browsers Soon
Very simple solution to the problem:

When you vote, you get a piece of paper saying your name, your vote, voter-id, and the machine's salt.

Whenever a vote is counted, it is added to a public website of HASHES. Thus anybody can verify the totals.

If anybody's recorded vote on the website (taken by hashing their info) doesn't match their receipt, fraud is caught (thus removing votes or changing votes isn't possible). Also, if I didn't vote or am dead, and my info is entered, we can verify no tally appears for my hash.

If the hashes don't match up with all the registered voters via registration forms, then votes have been added. Thus in order to add fake votes, fake voter registration forms must be filled out manually [leaving a paper trail to catch the perpetrator].
Not open source (at least, not yet, for the server-side).

The client side is on Github, but has absolutely no tests. Literally, the stub files for the tests are there, but that's it.

Node.JS dev community really needs to get religion with testing.

But lastly, it's also somewhat centralized. While you can run a Ripple daemon locally, the actual currency's distribution is centralized. Which I think is... not smart.
How much money is the real question? We don't know the full costs of researching and bringing a drug to market? I've never seen a study that outlines these costs in detail.
Yes, as long as the bot replied ONLY if the tip didn't go through.
I wish you wouldn't have changed the title. I'd be very interested in Tesla Motors' predictions, not so much in "Nikola Tesla's Amazing" predictions.
That's a neat project!

When generating huge numbers of png images, it's worth it to tweak the compression settings. Run png optimizers like optipng/pngcrush on your output, and use the settings it finds.

LodePNG is easy to use, but doesn't let you tweak as many options as libpng.

The tiles I've inspected are 15-30% larger than necessary-- besides using sub-optimal compression heuristics, they include unnecessary metadata (creation/modification time, aspect ratio).
I work for Desk.com, owned by a company that also owns Work.com and a few other one-syllable domains.

That company is Salesforce.com. They paid quite a bit for those domains. :O
When you say "magic", what you really mean is "abstraction", which is a more suitable and neutral word to describe the pros and cons of using a higher level language.

Not that I disagree with your premise - if you need to write highly performant code, lower level languages will pretty much always be faster. But abstraction is extremely beneficial in many other circumstances.
In Russia, there are ballot boxes that automatically count ballots. No fancy technology here - they just scan ballot, detect mark position, and after the end of the election day these ballot boxes just print resulting report.

These ballot boxes are installed on some small percent of polling stations(like 5% or 10% - I don't remember the exact number). But statistical analysis shows that electoral fraud is commited considerably less often on such polling stations. I don't know, whether it is actually more difficult to cheat on such stations(at least there is a physical limitation - you can't put more than one ballot at a time, because it is needed to be scanned, - as opposed to normal ballot box where you can easily put 10-20 ballots at once), or whether they decided to install such automated boxes on polling stations where they had no intention to commit fraud. But my point is:
1) "Paper-voting" is no guarantee of fair elections.
2) Sometimes "hi-tech" may even help you, if you use it properly.

You make a fair point about electronic voting(and I wholeheartedly agree with you), but it looks like you overestimate the reliability of old-fashioned methods.

To summarize, I'm calling you "not-enough-paranoid kook". :)
If we know all the primes issued by voters we can verify everything. It's a problem of splitting a set of primes between two disjoint sets. Knowing the product of both sets defines pretty much everything you want to know about them (including the fact that the sets are not disjoint or have members other than from the original set).
That's what I don't get. Seems app.net wants to be something to everybody. Not that I haven't done that very same mistake myself. But you you have to start small/scrappy and build up features. It's the only way.