skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe you're describing the mark sense style ballot scanners. Because you still have a paper ballot, they are not electronic ballots. (Apologies for not being more clear.)

http://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/optical/

I agree with your point, and only would add that the consensus among the election integrity experts is that poll-based ballot scanners which tally onsite immediately after the polls close are the most correct answer. This system has the lowest error rate. It is the easiest to audit (eg conduct a manual recount). Tampering with the results would be the most difficult (largest attack surface area).

The crucial trait of paper ballots cast and tabulated at poll sites is that such as system CAN be done correctly. Meaning enable the public vote count while ensuring the secret ballot. No electronic ballot system can make those guarantees, under any circumstances.

PS- I worked as a poll judge and poll inspector for a handful of elections. The jurisdiction where I reside had the same system as you described. It worked fabulously well. It was cheap. We've since moved to all postal ballots (vote by mail). Central count is a sausage factory. I fought against the transition, lost but was able to get some concessions, such as improved accounting (ballot processing) procedures.
Oh gawd. Please, tell us how Windows is "clumsy" to get setup on a network.

Also, the "extra cost" doesn't even figure into a benchmark. Grab a 120 day trial ISO from Microsoft and install.
Obviously, yes, I didn't mean Czechoslovakia, I know they are part of EU now. But I am pretty sure that Belarus didn't change too much, and Russia(especially in the Kaliningrad Oblast, while crossing from Poland) is the same as it used to be.
They don't say either way but it requires them to switch to Postgres so I think they would have said if they had.
> The problems occur when they're trying to do stuff on their local machines.

By all means, try to explain that to users if you like, and if you think they'd care. The issue is that it breaks the user experience, whatever technical reason you'd like to attribute that to.
There's also a bunch of stuff between error and malice. As we saw yesterday here, it's very obvious in pharmaceutical research, where the stuff getting funded and published is often heavily biased despite the best intentions of everybody (or almost everybody).

I suspect there are plenty of similar issues in economics. People with money are much more likely to support researchers whose work benefits or protects people with money. E.g., I happened to read a paper from a U of Chicago prof arguing that insider trading is actually beneficial. Boy, I wonder who the big donors are there. Probably not Mother Jones Magazine.
Sure you can buy some extra capacity to be able to scale, but only to a point. With ec2 you can "instantly" scale 1000x if you need (and built for it). You don't afford to have 1000x dedicated boxes idling in case you need to scale.

BUT! If you have a consistent load or are "big" if may very well be cheaper to build your own infrastructure with dedi/colo and later your own DC. Ec2 is good in the beginning when you truly need to be elastic and of course you will pay for that feature.

But a lot of the players out there uses both their own stuff AND cloud.
I hope this goes well. I got excited about using web technologies to build native mobile applications with WebOS, but am happier to see the non-profit Mozilla take charge on it.

I also agree with other commenters that it's a great idea for them to attack the emerging markets rather than compete with the huge players in the US and Europe. Excited to see that revolution.

I've always supported Mozilla's mission, but I'm still a Chrome user because I feel like it's a more polished consumer product, particular in the area of design. Every time I get that F the establishment motivation and open Firefox, I look at the tab structure and the separate url and search bars and close it again. Sad face.
My Goal is To Do Nothing
That still doesn't prevent you from needing to do that on each request.

Also, with most frameworks, they're usually quite complex; how else are you going to be everything for everyone? Complexity comes at a cost, most notably in framework land this takes the form of code with very tall inheritance structures and/or tons of dependencies.

You need Foo? Ok, Foo inherits from BaseFoo, which inherits from CoreBaseFoo, which inherits from the Widget class, which itself is a BaseWidget, etc. Let's implement a few interfaces too, and now load in various dependencies... pretty soon that simple, 5-line class that you implemented now requires 100+ classes.

Things like op-code caching can greatly reduce this per-request penalty, but it doesn't change the fact that it still happens.
Eeek. Didn't realize there was that delta on patents on v2 vs v3. Was aware of that problem with MIT/bsd though. Apache2 kinda is the MIT/bsd with explicit patent grants I guess.

I suppose that idemnification from code patent issues is probably part of the commercial license / product then?
Hiring is Dating
One big differentiating feature between TokuDB and other write optimized databases is that TokuDB is fully transactional, it is ACID compliant. There is a demand for this.

AFAIK, TokuDB is the only write-optimized transactional data store. We (I work at Tokutek) are working on integrating with MongoDB as we speak, and when we do, we will bring transactional semantics to MongoDB in addition to improved performance.

So, I think there is still a big demand out there that TokuDB will be able to meet
You're not doing anything wrong; RoR is a different style of framework, that does more things in a declarative style. Its more intuitive for lots of people, but probably not so much with people with lots of system programming experience, for whom a framework with less "magic" is likely to be more intuitive.
Cure: Serendipitous Search
Last time I looked, the font wasn't fully finished though. Maybe the italic version will come later?
From Brazil to Wikipedia: The Surprising Journey of Lua from Rio
Firefox: I am 10 years old
Chrome: I am 30 years old
IE: crashed in the end
CRAPCHA Pranks You With Hopeless CAPTCHA Tests
Weirdly, sunshine may contribute to suicidal behaviour. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21821241
It's our internal framework.

From our first benchmarks post: http://www.techempower.com/blog/2013/03/28/framework-benchma... "Why include this Gemini framework I've never heard of?" We have included our in-house Java web framework, Gemini, in our tests. We've done so because it's of interest to us. You can consider it a stand-in for any relatively lightweight minimal-locking Java framework. While we're proud of how it performs among the well-established field, this exercise is not about Gemini. We routinely use other frameworks on client projects and we want this data to inform our recommendations for new projects.
Is the laravel on the benchmark Laravel 3 or Laravel 4? Still, CodeIgniter is the fastest PHP framework? Wow.
Yes I want one too. The only hitch is dealing with the actual providers in the US, my current contract, and how much they want me on a plan that rips me off. But I'd imagine this will be a moderate hit with developers who end up making apps, which ends up selling more phones. I've never liked the Android or iPhone development environments.
I am not sure everyone will perceive it like that.
A lot of people rate Facebook at 1-star because they don't like Facebook as a whole (I think I saw the term "protest vote" somewhere else in this thread). The reviews that just say "I hate Facebook" clearly aren't indicative of Home as a whole.
Ooh, very interesting questions. :-) I'm not sure I have the answers for these questions, but I do have some ideas.

Most APIs don't want to provide data analysis capabilities. They want to provide data. Data analysis is a really hard problem space. For the FBI example, the FBI doesn't want to build an analytics tool for you to use; that's not their core business, and it's not something that helps them achieve their goals.

Data analysis versus data are two different problems with different classes of solutions; for example, a valid approach to delivering data might be an API to retrieve compressed, batch (nightly) downloads of events or deltas. That's not the only solution, of course, but I just mean to create an example that's a different point-of-view.

If you intend to provide data analysis from your API, I would say that is the "intent" of your API and you should design it as such, with the appropriate flexibility and user-defined behaviour that is required to answer arbitrary queries from users. This is a hard API to design, build, and scale.

When designing a data analysis API, you should address scenarios like a user making a valid API request that can't be delivered in real-time; is it your intention to make your API accessible in real-time, in which case you have to either crash horribly or tell this request to piss off? Or is it your intent to provide the analysis no matter what, in which case perhaps it would be valid to queue such queries, process them in batches with limited concurrency, and deliver the results when completed.

Regarding the unmet needs of users, you should always provide a feedback mechanism for your API. This is something that varies a lot depending upon your customer; a lot of developers work in "enterprise" software, where the feedback channel is usually pretty apparent. Public APIs with an undefined audience will have a harder time getting that feedback, but usually you can bet that the importance of an issue is proportional to the number of times you hear about it.
well there's 50,000 startups on Angellist right now. Approx. 5,000 of them are funded so that their founders are millionaires. Here's your answer ;) And if your startup is not on Angellist, you haven't tried really.
Sorry to Disrupt: Valleywag Is Back
I want to try Gemini. Can you give me some tips to start?
Fractal Tree indexes are very different from Dancing Trees. See http://tokutek.com/what-is-a-fractal-tree for an overview, and I'd be happy to answer questions if you have them.
Reserved instances are simply a pricing construct. You're paying upfront for up to 24/7 usage, but you're running on the same pool as the standard instance. Dedicated instances, on the other hand, do what you're talking about but they're much pricier:

http://aws.amazon.com/dedicated-instances/
Okay, I agree with that - I'll change that :)
> I don't think it is right to say one is discrimination and the other is not.
> In both cases you are making prejudicial judgements about people through categorization.

They are both discrimination, and they are both prejudicial judgement, but only one is illegal. Any property or characteristic of a candidate you use to make a hiring decision is the process of discriminating between the available candidates, and making prejudicial judgements.

Discrimination based on certain properties, like gender, is illegal. Discrimination based on any other properties, like college education, prior experience, communication skills, or how quickly (or more often slowly) they can do FizzBuzz is called 'the decision making process'.

An effective hiring process usually starts with trying to find good places to advertise, and then followed very shortly by figuring out how you will discriminate/prejudge the qualified candidates from the other [95% of] applicants.

As a general guide, typically it's the immutable properties which are the ones where discrimination is illegal.
So probably you have two separate subsystems of "jobs" distribution. Assigning to a person, querying and updating job statuses from some UI is very different from automatic computation of a result by a software component.
I'm not explaining anything to the users, I'm just explaining to you how you're wrong when you state that they "broke the web for their users".

The users are completely irrelevant, because no matter how much they bitch and moan, they're not going to leave Facebook. Its network effects are too powerful. And so, for once, I actually support Facebook. They're using their dominant market position to push a new standard that is quite good. This will hopefully force companies like Adobe to start adding support for WebP by default. Then we'll finally able to ditch obsolete standards like JPEG and its ilk once and for all.
Indeed, these are probably similar. I had a friend travel relatively recently to Russia, Ukraine and the zone and he says that although he didn't suffer anything odd, the general feeling around borders was... tense.

I guess the game could be classified as dystopian for its day-to-day change in the regulations and permits needed... It kind of makes it into a mock of the "real" strong border policy of some of these countries (and many others around the world)
The Larevel test was community-contributed, but according to its readme [1], this is 3.2.14. Is Laravel 4 production-ready?

[1] https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/tree/mast...
Top prosecutor for Boston bomber: Carmen Ortiz
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5579538
SOSCharger Self-Powered iPhone & Smart Phone Charger
There are significant restrictions as far as what benchmarks from the .Net framework are allowed to be publicly published. Not sure if this has anything to do with why this project hasnt included ASP .Net
oh, I see https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/mast...

I guess it was about sessions and auth hitting the db?
What would be nice is to find a decent site/app for tracking food intake. That is one area that I would love to track but the current landscape of apps for it are lacking.

MyFitnessPal's UI is pretty bad but seems to have decent data if you can find it.

Fitbit's UI is nice but the food database and lookup is atrocious.
The Mobile Landscape - 5 Years In
If there was a bug at Amazon I recommend giving them a call on the phone. I've found that the customer service reps for AWS are quite nice, thoughtful and genuinely seem to care about developers on AWS.

A while back I found a bug on AWS which caused our costs to skyrocket. SO, I called and pointed out the issue and they gladly refunded the money and apologized.
That VP of Sales number looks low. The article does say "salary," so it may technically be correct, but I'm sure total cash comp (not including options) is higher.
Wait, can you do that for the Google-default apps too? I have a half dozen Google+ settings/messengers/other things that I can't uninstall from my phone (Nexus), when I really just want to hide them from view.
We have some more descriptions of Fractal Tree Indexes at http://tokutek.com/what-is-a-fractal-tree, and I'm always happy to answer questions about it.
If you are interested in this, you should look at our source distribution's license file. We have done the work to get a patent license from MIT, Stony Brook, and Rutgers so that the users of the GPL'd code can use the fractal tree patents.

Indemnification is a completely different issue: no open source software that I know of provides any kind of indemnification which would protect you from a lawsuit by a third party.

-Bradley (bradley@tokutek.com)
Not being a web programmer, I have a naive question:

Are many websites running into speed or scalability issues?

I see programmers in other areas spend a lot of man-hours optimizing code that isn't a meaningful bottleneck. Is the same thing happening here?
Thalmic calls for MYO devs
>xkcd has been hitting it out of the park consistently of late

I haven't checked it in a few years since it was getting so bad, so based on this I went and looked through the most recent dozen or so comics. Can you point to some of these home runs? Because all I saw was the same inane observations without adding any insight or thought or a joke or anything. I'm honestly not just trying to be contrarian, I just can't see how his recent work is in any way different from the last 3 years.
Unicode in five minutes
Aerojet, the company that reworks the old engines before sending them to Orbital, purchased 36 engines. That's enough for 18 Antares rockets. That will cover the current CRS contract and maybe a follow-up or some commercial satellite launches. Beyond that Aerojet has a license to manufacture US-made copies of the engines. That isn't as easy as following a recipe, but it is something they are working on.
Why developers are leaving the Facebook platform
Former Gowalla designer leaves Facebook after 16 months
Is the following a fair generalization?

Java should be the conservative choice for your web framework's language (rather than PHP). Scala, Clojure, Nodejs, Erlang, Lua, and Haskell should be in your list of workable yet "cool" languages (rather than Ruby or Python).
Yeah, there must be lots of people like that. I'm just comparing it to Facebook app which has 3,5 rating (which I'm sure lots of haters 1-star it too but still end up with acceptable rating)
If you're interested in seeing what's left of their reputation, take a look at Google's cache of their page. Looks like some malware:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
awesome, great way to spike out real time behavior in minutes.
Who Cares If It's Been Tried Before?
He referenced "growth phase" which presumably means after having raised a venture round in the tens of millions or higher.

Certainly no one should be paying themselves this much after a $2MM series A.
Oh what a world. A data structure should never be patentable - what's the difference between a data structure and a math formula? Both are just notations for reality, and can spring up in the minds of many disparate inventors.

I'd really like to see TokuDB discuss its patents, why they have them, and what they intend to do with them. I'd like to see a page like that from every corporation on their website actually.
> Any movement that lacks explicit acknowledgement of statistical significance is worrisome to me.

I'm not necessarily too worried about that. Statistical significance is the wrong concept for QS and its use is essentially cargo cult statistics.

Leaving aside the profound conceptual and applied problems with null-hypothesis testing ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/g13/against_nhst/ ), QS is much closer to cost-benefit analysis where effect sizes and costs are the critical variables, not alpha. We don't care about testing some intervention and not making the completely arbitrary cutoff of 0.05 (which doesn't mean anything about the truth of the hypothesis in the first place)! We care whether the intervention make a large impact on the variable in question and how expensive the intervention was; if, say, the intervention is an expensive supplement that costs hundreds of dollars a year, we want a higher burden of proof than if the intervention is something free (like taking your vitamin D supplement in the morning rather than evening) or something we should be doing anyway (like exercise).

Far* more worrisome than QS's failure to run t-tests and ritually chant 'we calculate a p-value of <0.05 therefore we reject the null hypothesis of no difference' is the pervasive publication bias (who reports failed experiments?), the absence of blinding even where quite easy leading to severe placebo effects (many supplements), tiny sample sizes, and dodgy data collection (selection bias).

* If you are wondering why anyone would care about my opinion, I've been self-experimenting for years and have a little bit of insight into the matter; see http://www.gwern.net/Zeo http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics and http://www.gwern.net/Weather
Orbital has the US rights to build new copies of the original NK-33. Presumably they'd set up some kind of production line once they have enough customers to exhaust their russian-sourced supply.
Then look harder.
Google Now for the web: Google testing a much more data-heavy home page
Is Sifteo the new Nintendo?
Hello, I can make it. If you want we can talk about this, just write me at filippo.mursia (@) gmail.com

Best,
Filippo
There are a number of negative studies recently that show exercise doesn't help depression.

It's probably not going to hurt, especially if there's some social stuff built in.
If you don't have intelligent queries and a proper cache system. At least. You will quickly crash your database or saturate your traffic. It can even hurt small traffic websites (I remember coding a webchat with Mysql and crashing my database with only 5 people chatting).
I find it useful if it's mostly automated. I use a basis band for sleep & activity, and a fitbit aria scale for weight. It being automated doesn't stress me out and it's useful to have a history to see trends.

I also find it fun to start some runkeeper app when I go on bike rides, and that only takes about a minute or two before I start it. I never actually look at the history of my cardio workouts, but it's fun to have the stats while I'm biking, and to see a map of where I went after I'm done.
A little too generalized, LuaJIT is winning some of the benchmarks
running apt-get install php5-apc;/etc/init.d/apache restart command will (at least) make it 3 times faster.

apc is no-config, no-cost php accelerator :)
The types of queries we run against it don't require real-time results, and we do a pretty heavy amount of subsetting. By the time it reaches the point where we do numerical summaries and statistics, the largest set I've worked with here was around 30GB. Most times it's around 5-10GB.
Hopscotch App Aims To Get Both Girls And Boys Interested In Programming
Viola through Glass
But then Facebook have to store two formats, something I'm sure they don't want to do.
I completely agree. This is the exact problem that we are trying to solve at my current startup, http://Banyan.co
I really wonder what 'average' means in this context since the average venture backed startup is a total failure.

I imagine there's also a huge disparity between the salaries of executives at companies across the seed->A round->B round->...->IPO spectrum as well.
Hope this helps, from Tokutek's website: http://www.tokutek.com/solutions/
You're not getting his argument. I can have friends and colleagues that I want to stay in touch with, but I don't necessarily want to read everything they post. Facebook doesn't give you very effective tools for filtering content as opposed to people. Mind you, this is general problem in social, I'm not trying to single out FB particularly.
Do you have any plans to run asp.net MVC webapi on .net 4.5 using the task parallel library ?
Repurposing Photoshop For The Web
Hmm, like Knight Capital? Oh, wait..
Nick, since you're advocating transparency, I'd be curious to know the salaries paid by venture capital companies, such as North Atlantic Capital. For instance, what does an associate, managing director, or marketing director make?