skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, the system is basically honest and above board. It just has quirks that would be made worse if they were "fixed". Our electoral system has evolved over the past century to be, quite honestly, one of the most open, progressive and balanced electoral systems in the world.

What we in Australia call "exhaustive preferential voting" is sometimes called "instant runoff voting" elsewhere. Having to number every box is a feature, not a bug. If you don't have an exhaustive ballot, then in practice political parties will encourage voters to "just vote 1" -- to mark only one box.

And then you've arrived at a first-past-the-post system, which is what IRV is trying to get away from in the first place.

In the House of Reps, few candidates turn out because it's very difficult for a non-major party candidate to win. It happens, but only rarely. So in any given seat it would be unusual to find more than 5 or 6 candidates -- 2 majors, a green, whatever microparty is currently making a push and perhaps the local village idiot or somebody who doesn't realise that running as an independent is a mug's game.

But the Senate is different. The Senate is based on proportional representation. Each State elects 6 senators, and the Senate seats are effectively allocated to parties according to the final distribution of votes. In a recursive process, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their votes redistributed according to the voter preferences, up and up until there are 6 people with a full "quota" of votes.

The thing about the Senate is that the final Senate seat in any given state is usually in play. The top 4 seats are almost always won equally by the majors; the 5th usually won by a major or the Greens. But the 6th seats can and frequently do wind up in the hands of the most unlikely people because of the complicated preference deals I described above.

Because there is a chance for a microparty candidate to wind up in the Senate, lots of people run. Being a Senator is a pretty sweet deal. Good pay, your own offices and staff, travel entitlements and the like. And if you luck into holding the balance of power in the Senate, you've just become a very powerful individual.
that was 2012 .
I can bet you there will be now
They stem from evolution of social animals. Monkeys know right from wrong. They know when they've been taken advantage of.
Important question, can this game be solved, like ordinary tic-tac-toe. Is there a solution that always leads to draw of defeat.
suck eggs murica
It's pretty up to date. Xamarin (the company behind Mono) uses the LLVM-backend to create native C# applications to run on iOS (as iOS doesn't allow for JIT compilation).
>That's not really his business to stick his nose and interrogate you

Come on, it's not an interrogation. You can refuse to engage in the conversation. You can stop it at any time, and you can get the laptop you wanted after the sales guy rendered his opinion.
Ghostery has the option to block all trackers at once in a big list with 1490 trackers. Disconnect 2 doesn't provide this option, does that mean that all the known trackers are blocked by default?

Some pages I visit show 100+ requests but when I enter the add-on it only shows 2 advertising attempts and maybe 1 analytics request. Where do these other hundred requests come from and were they effectively blocked from communicating with its third-party provider?

Disconnect 2 basically replaces HTTPS Everywhere, which I find nice.
Walmart taking the Chromebook mainstream
What Is Macro Hygiene?
HTML5 games with Adobe Flash and Toolkit for Dart
> The implication is that the rest of the information is too dangerous to release.

Is it? I thought the implication was that Guardian will publish further stories on it and drag it out rather than dump it all at once.
AngularJS is being ported to Dart
Speculative Lock Elision in Varnish Cache
Can someone tldr this article? I tried to read it on my phone but the "view this on mobile" not only blocked all content but had an unreachable close button
There is no philosophical definition of consciousness, but there is none of gravity either, in the sense of "what gravity really is". Science doesn't examine what things "really are", but tries to make useful predictions and the definitions employed are only means to this end. In fact there are operational definitions of consciousness and I think they certainly deserve to be called "scientific", see for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness#Neural_correlate...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness#Defining_conscio...
A "small" update? I think this is more like the difference between checkers and chess. But yes, relevant xkcd
For those who find this a bit hard to follow, I found the translation in the Penguin edition to be free-flowing and quite poetic in places.
Converse: The wah wah shoe
> This means that to emulate the near one quadrillion connections in the human brain would take about $10B today

It's important though to recognize that we're still missing the appropriate software to run brains. Technically, BlueBrain can run a cat's cortex today. Practically though just pumping up the number of neurons and connections does not yield general intelligence or consciousness, so BlueBrain cannot actually run a cat. Just as an even bigger supercluster cannot just run a human-like intelligence, even though the processing power might be there.

Furthermore, these are brute-force simulation ambitions. I would go out on a limb here and assert that we could actually run a human-level consciousness on much less hardware. Computers are very good at some things where our brains have to mount enormous infrastructure just in order to do OK.
this means that facebook do not care about the fat of its users, as now thousands of activists in tyrant regimes might risk their identities be found and that means they will go to jail.
Regardless of whether you can build a perfect AI on commodity hardware, though I haven't played this yet, it promises to be a much more interesting game than the normal tic-tac-toe!

Harder to draw a lot on napkins though, but then again, a single game takes much longer.
Rawdog's author has filed a bug [1] against feedparser.

[1]: https://code.google.com/p/feedparser/issues/detail?id=407
Hadoop Data Ingestion
Finding That Inner Calm
Machine learning might be a useful model of what happens in the brain but just like the map isn't the territory this doesn't make us robots, what would that even mean? Everything aside, biological systems are completely different than everything we have ever built and so far it seems current machine learning techniques not necessarily have to have much to do with what happens in the brain.
Raspberry streaming server for keychain 808 #3 with ffmpeg
There you go, a free hand one :-)

https://bubbleideas.com/letters/ultimate-tic-tac-toe
My daughters play a variant of tic-tac-toe with a physical board and just three stones each.

I brute-forced this with a little lunchbreak program and the visualisation output from graphviz was ... 340 MEGAPIXELS!

I blogged about it: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/35858593837/tic-t...
If a company sells a product to a customer who needs something different, that customer will assume the product is bad. Saying "my company failed because my software didn't run on those Apple machines" is nonsense to us, but your average consumer will take this as a sign to actively avoid Apple products. If that customer never had a bad experience with Apple, it's less likely they'll complain about them.
This list covers a lot of good ground, one of the smaller but i think important points is this: "simplify". It's part of your job as a tech lead to show your team a simpler route. Simple code reduces complexity, which makes maintenance easier, and can get you to your goal faster. A lot of new to intermediate guys will over engineer a small piece (and i mean that literally, for some reason i've never had the experience of women over engineering code).
ta3ala akolak
I was at a trade show last week for a company which sells 3D printers of Makerbot-style besides R&D. Next to us was a company selling 3D printing as a service but on professional machines, thus finer resolution and larger objects. I referred several people to them and one visitor was simply astonished that I sold 'another company' to him. To me it was a matter of common sense because he'd been unhappy with our printers.
Top 5 free Image Hosting Services to use as a blogger
iOS7 Life of Pi Easter Egg
New York City Council Moves Against 3D-Printed Guns
My experience testing helpers with rails 3
Very helpful for anyone looking to hire such a person too - almost a checklist of things to ask them about from their experience.
Advice From Women VCs
I´m a brazilian and yes, it seems like "Occupy Brazil"
The ultimate hotel check-in, complete with 24-carat gold iPad
This isn't "giving" a privilege. It is a matter of not burdening them with something that is completely unnecessary.

These other companies signed away their point of sale long, long ago. Then everyone gets laws passed which demand that anyone in the future add middle men so they will be equally inefficient.

Of course the argument always comes up, "it's the law, they should abide by it." This argument is always paired with the implied notion that they shouldn't even challenge the law. They should just go along with the law that their competitors wrote to prevent competition. It's a bad law, it needs changing. If it gets changed then everyone can enjoy the same "privilege".

Tesla wants to make something and sell it. This shouldn't require government "privilege" to accomplish. The notion of government planning of industry needs to be squashed.
Ok, I agree. But that's not what you wrote. If you had written the exact same post but concluded with a suggestion the OP start one it would have changed the tone immensely. What you wrote above was nothing more than boasting.
Can anyone recommend a book/online course to get into machine learning, at least to get an overview of all the different types, what their strengths are, and real world examples of what's possible at the cutting edge?
you can of course get away with this an make yourself look 'good' when all of your products are unreasonably priced to start with... you can buy/assemble most of their top-end systems for the cost of the bottom end... and getting equivalents to their bottom ends typically save around 50% :)
Mako: a stack-based VM game console in F#
McAfee web gateway flags this site as 'Malicious site.' Something to check there.
The world’s top nations for female entrepreneurs
Why I Admire Kanye West
War is a booming industry - Infographic
We saved you a click. :-) Disconnect blocks (2,000+ tracking sites) by default.

The number of requests in the dropdown menu should add up to the number of requests in the toolbar counter (we do group requests by company, which Ghostery doesn't do, so you will see less rows in Disconnect's UI if that's what you mean). Do you have a site where the two aren't equal?
Yeah. The combination of NewsBlur's speed and yoleo's minimalism would be perfect for me.
Corbett is a great read, just the right amount of humour about a deeply serious matter. I've been following his TSA blog for a while now and his tenacity is impressive.

For me, what he is now running into is deeply concerning beyond the whole NSA stuff; secret courts, hidden behind the executive branch is a precedent that should never be set.

I hope Corbett's work here gets picked up widely by the media.
MIT-born Education Venture “Spokes” Takes Its Model on the Road
Death is not the gift.

The time we get with our loved ones is the gift.

That's really where you get to experience the emotions that make you happy to be alive. Joy, love, hope, desire, anger, frustration, etc. I'll say that a NEAR death experience tends to be more of a gift, it happened to my brother and changed him drastically. Not all for the better, but much of it was good.

I think the idea of calling death a gift is bullshit. Yes, you can learn and grow from the death of a loved one, but that isn't a gift, it's the absence of their presence (the real gift) that makes you realize what you had.

To me, life without the lows and highs, is boring. That is because lows make people realize how special the high points are. But I know other people who would be content without either.
Particular frameworks, CMSes, blog systems and other widely-installed web apps are targeted all the time.

When examining web server access logs, it's quite common to see hundreds of requests coming in from a single host during a short period of time, looking to see if certain exploitable framework- or app-specific pages exist.

Such scanners do appear to target certain frameworks or web apps, contrary to your suggestion that this does not happen.
The data from the quantified will impact the future – video
My favorite "mathematician game" is Sprouts: http://nrich.maths.org/2413

First heard about it in a column in Scientific American by A. K. Dewdney. The rules are simple and it is rather fun. In one of his columns he talked about playing a toroidal version where a line going off one edge of a rectangular page comes back in on the opposite side.
I don't understand the clarifying rule #2: "What if my opponent sends me to a board that’s full?" Isn't that impossible, as there is a maximum of 9 ways to be sent to each local area?
This is great news. Now that we've proven the animals are conscious, we can put more resources into communicating and reasoning with them, and convince them to stop maiming, killing and eating each other. Peace on Earth, maybe within our lifetimes!

Edit: </sarcasm>
Sounds a lot like South Africa.
Both Apple and Google should take app engagement instead of pure downloads as the main metric to base these top lists on. As Marco says, pure downloads becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, easy to game and does not expose you to new interesting apps.

http://blog.mobtest.com/2013/05/app-engagement-is-a-much-bet...
serendipity: a stroke of luck, typically beneficial.
SF is one of the most family-unfriendly places in the whole US. No-one can afford to live there with kids.
Object of Interest: The Flash Drive
No they are not. Omitting qualia disqualifies almost all existing models of consciousness. One of the only ones I know that attempt an explanation of this phenomenon may be Tononi's IIT [1], but it is of course criticised for being too broad a definition.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Information_Theory
How to Get Your iPhone Broken Screen Fixed?
"The Brave New Day never comes"

Isn't that the "Iron law of oligarchy":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy
That's a very strange segue.
Their talking points seem to be sticking close to these two phrases: "We do not listen to your telephone calls," and "We do not target your emails."[1] Interpreted the way the intelligence community interprets these words, listening to telephone calls and targeting your emails probably does not include:

* listening to your Skype conversations

* storing your emails (it's already legal for them to access emails older than 180 days w/o a warrant) [1]

* auto-translating your emails and generating summaries [2]

Getting more cynical/paranoid:

* using these summaries and data to flag communications based on some 'suspicion' heuristic[3]

* auto-generate and robo-sign a subpoena

* emailing it to the FISA court

Given our known capabilities in these areas, and the intelligence and diligence of those in our intelligence community, it's not unlikely that they are automating a great deal of the analysis they conduct, using software that yields results by methods we'd have called artificial intelligence a decade a go.

I would love to know if it is legal for machine learning and intelligence to generate enough suspicion for a warrant. Given what happened in the finance industry with robo-signing, is it going to far to suspect that the same process might be automating the generation and approval of individualized warrants?

[1] Yesterday in an Obama in an interview said, "What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls, and the NSA cannot target your emails … and have not". Then seconds later repeated: "if you’re a U.S. person, then NSA is not listening to your phone calls and it’s not targeting your emails unless it’s getting an individualized court order". Why use the same words to be vague when different phrasing would have clarified?

[2] 'FBI Documents Suggest Feds Read Emails Without a Warrant', ACLU:
http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-and-li...

[3] e.g., "John Smith and someone probably his wife had a conversation about a party with James, Linda, and Osama Bin Laden on October 1st"
The Ministry of Defence has issued a D notice preventing the UK media from 'publish[ing] information that may "jeopardise both national security and possibly UK personnel"'.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/defence-d-bbc-me...
Good reading on iOS 7
The Mac Pro from an audio pros perspective
6-inch, 500ppi Mobile Displays Are in the Works
Neat variant. I made something similar for the last ludum dare: http://madelfino.github.io/LD26/postcompo.html
How Fast Should the Developer's SQL Server Be?
Misleading, the article says it shows up exactly at the 3:14 mark. Which is incorrect. It appears at 3:11, and happens to pass through 3:14. Still an interesting coincidence, but not nearly as amazing as the article makes it sound.
Show HN: PRISM take that – Old School Steganography (80 chars only)
You Need A Go Command
Ok, thanks. I prefer to block everything by default, so for me per-site basis is not very convenient. In the case of Disqus: on most websites I don't read the comments and I prefer to block all the requests (mostly 100+ if you include the gravatars).
With Ghostery I just block everything, but this is also not perfect because, as you mentioned, you sometimes don't see all the content. It would be nice if the add blockers could block content in the way Chrome blocks plugins: everything is disabled, by you have a placeholder which informs you that something was blocked, and when you click on it, it loads the content.

OpenX is indeed blocked (I checked it with the chrome dev tools), but it doesn't show up in the Advertising category, e.g. http://www.openx.com/.
From the NSA's website:

> I'm often asked the question, "What's more important – civil liberties or national security?" It's a false question; it's a false choice. At the end of the day, we must do both, and they are not irreconcilable. We have to find a way to ensure that we support the entirety of the Constitution – that was the intention of the framers of the Constitution, and that's what we do on a daily basis at the National Security Agency.

http://www.nsa.gov/about/values/core_values.shtml
Are you equating consciousness with rationality and intelligence?
TLDR; Fixing disease is not preventing death.

I don't think he's talking about improving the length of life, but instead not looking for the fountain of life, or anything else that would create those who live forever.

If we all lived forever, then there would be no children, or parents really. If we really lived forever, not drastically longer lives, Earth wouldn't be able to sustain any sort of birthrate.

So yes, we need to attempt to push death off for as long as possible, that's also part of living. Think about a world without babies, or puppies. Just middle aged people who don't die... It would be very different and no one can say good or bad, because humans are really bad at those kind of simulations. We are overly optimistic.
EU: Mobile telecoms firms probed for details of Google Android deals
Play Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe Against an AI
Like customer service such that customers perpetuate said marketing.
A cheerful way to steganography: Compose and download a punchcard at http://masswerk.at/keypunch then mail it to a friend. Scan this card back to text at "The Virtual Card Reader" http://masswerk.at/cardreader. Any URL, e-mail address, or Twitter-user will be detected and presented as a working link. (Even solves simple arithmetic expressions.)
I Would Have Hired NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden
Has anybody tried asking Facebook why they've done this?

Possible reasons:

1. One or more governments (which ones?) have told Facebook to block Tor or else. (Or else what?)

2. A manual security review revealed more hacking attempts via Tor than legitimate use, so Facebook decided to block Tor.

3. After a sustained hacking attack via Tor, an automated Facebook security system automatically blocked Facebook access from Tor.

Further questions: When did Facebook start blocking Tor? Any idea when they might stop?

It's a pitifully poor article.
It is very complicated. I upgraded one of our apps from 2.3 to 3.2 recently. The nicest thing was that the app didn't have any views and even the controller layer was slim; we had only one!

The update took around two weeks of time from two developers. The app is one of our core apps and runs very important tasks. Probably the best thing is to remove Rails completely from there.
No, that's a crass abstraction of what we are.

To a philistine the Mona Lisa is nothing but a bunch of pigments applied to a surface. That's what makes him a philistine, after all.
There's a big difference between a declaration and a proof.
Isn't it possible that the first board played could become full since the first mark isn't the result of normal gameplay?

Move 0.
I am assuming that if something is technically possible, they're doing it. So, they're tracking telecom metadata and storing content because they can.

In fact I believe that the only reason our physical mail was mostly not read had nothing to do with the 4th Amendment, and everything to do with that it was logistically impossible and still have a working postal service, and difficult to keep secret.

With modern mail sorting machinery, I'm sure there is metadata being collected on physical mail.
1984, Hungarian Edition
Mute.js - A minimalistic, yet powerful, client-side template engine.
Munger on Middlemen

" ... about the often-vilified middleman--someone who buys cheap, sells dear and does nothing to improve the product. Munger explains the economic function of arbitrage using a classic article about how prices emerged in a POW camp during World War II. "

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2008/10/munger_on_middl.htm...
The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Subversion 1.8.0
I'm wary of this. Would like it as an option, but I don't necessarily want my app to change between uses, especially if it's something I need to use quickly. Loading up something with a changed UI, or data changes that need to happen, or whatever, when I wasn't expecting it.... won't make me a happy camper. A notification and ability to trigger the update from in the app would be nice, and having the option of 'auto update' would be nice too. I just don't necessarily want it to be the default with no option to opt out.
The problem is without any philosophical backup the neural correlate is entirely uncompelling—it's merely a clinical definition of a measure of... nothing meaningful. One that can be just as easily applied to a recording device, modulo the explicit mention of neurons.

It gets worse. When you look at it closely there's no useful reason to restrict any of these measures with arbitrary criteria to the things we consider candidates for consciousness, other than to reaffirm our prejudices.

In other words, there's no such thing as a good scientific definition without the philosophical context. You can have as accurate an arbitrary measure as you like, but that doesn't imbue it equally arbitrarily with your desired meaning.
No, the story was that Rep. Nadler said something confusing and ambiguous in a public hearing that referred to a secret briefing and that some reporters ran with the statements and assumed the worst.

For what it's worth, from what I've seen of Rep. Nadler in the past, he doesn't seem like the kind of craven politician who would either equivocate or be scared into submission.
Sprouts Explained