skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In that case a simpler fix would be to allow any independent party (within reason) to supply and use their own software and render their own tally.

If the parties are mutually distrusting, and their tallies still agree, that can be enough to trust the outcome. Auditing the source code has no real utility; it's worthless because you can't be sure that the code you've audited is the code actually running. "Open and verifiable" means nothing in that context.
As counterpoint a lot of the comments in this very discussion are on the distaste or appreciation of the concept of PC master race. Clearly it is a subject that gets people talking.
The algorithm is public. It's the Australian Electoral Commission's implementation of it, their software, that's used in public elections that they're calling a trade secret.
Cosmic rays also don't get deflected by the magnetic field (either photons or very high energy particles). The atmosphere's density shields us from radiation much more than the magnetic field. Also a full half of the sky's radiation is shielded by the ground.
It's true that this Church language seems to be little more than Scheme with a few clever tricks that allows it to walk through code paths and execute programs in clever probabilistic ways. I don't claim to understand it all, however, the clever tricks seem to be very clever and things are put together so well with emphasis on just the right concepts that, to me at least, it makes certain aspects of probabilistic models like the relationship between correlation, causation, induction and deduction much clearer than anything I have seen before.

Years ago when I was a grad student, I tried to tackle some NLP problems using similar approaches (ie. unsupervised generative bayesian models organized in hierarchical ways that try to mimic our intuitive concept of causality) but mostly failed at making much headway. I couldn't figure out some of the math and my models usually failed to perform any better than other probabilistic algorithms. No one at my university did anything similar or knew much about bayesian probabilities back then which didn't help.

I always believed in the approach however and until I stumbled on this book, never knew there was significant progress being made. I wish it was available to build upon when I was a student.

In the "Learning as Conditional Inference" chapter the section "Inferring an Arithmetic Expression" show the first example I have seen of a legitimate and flexible approach that could some day allow a computer to program itself. I mean the algorithm is still far from doing general programming tasks but I could imagine extending the approach so that given a programming language grammar and a unit tests as inputs, a computer could write a well chosen and simplified program that pass the tests (simplified with the automatic Occam's razor inherent in the bayesian approaches) . That to me is mind-blowing.

Now not all is perfect in the book, the "Inference about Inference" chapter seems oversimplified to me. The last few chapter seem to get a bit mathematically ad-hoc with an alpha parameter introduced to tie categories and sub-categories together in hierarchical models without much mathematical justification. On the other hand, there is strong evidence for this kind of transfer of information in hierarchies and it's not totally unreasonable to make up a parameter, assign it a bayesian uninformative prior that reflects ignorance of how this parameter should be set and try to induce a value for it from data. It's a perfect example of meta probabilities where probabilities are used to guess parameters that govern other probabilities. It's very bayesian.

Anyways before reading this book I was convinced that general AI was not going to happen in my lifetime. Now I'm not so sure.
FCC Extends Open Internet Comment Period Until Friday, July 18
I would prefer if the input to the software was published and anyone could verify the outcome. Unfortunately, currently none of this information is published and the whole system is based on trust.
I don't think anything "magically" changed it - more just it evolved over time. See the quote from Yonatan I posted elsewhere in this thread regarding the original motivations and successes or lack thereof.

No idea on evidence question.
Depending on how much of that thing is buried, it sounds like it could be comparable to Ahnighito (3.4m x 2.1m x 1.7m): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ahnighito_AMNH,_34_tons_me... or the Willamette Meteorite (3m x 2m x 1.3m): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willamette_Meteorite#mediaviewe...
I'm only replying to say a personal thank you for pursuing this. Australia has such weak individual rights, it is so important that people like yourself put your hand to pursue them on occasions like this when it is important. Keep going!
Write to your Senator, say the AEC's refusal to comply[1] with Senate Order 330[2] is wrong and you'd like it challenged.

(Note that while it was moved by a Greens Senator, I'm not affiliated with the Greens and this is not a party political thing that's going on)

Failing that, maybe consider donating to my fund to fight this decision in court: http://pozi.be/easycountaat?ra=247325

[1]: http://lee-rhiannon.greensmps.org.au/sites/default/files/ron...

[2]: http://lee-rhiannon.greensmps.org.au/content/news-stories/up...
Australian elections ARE pen and paper.

The ballots are entered (by hand AFAIK) into the AEC's central system to compute the complex preference flows. Realistically, the algorithm isn't that complicated, and the ABC does a good job at guestimating it [1]. This is why it is so surprising they refuse to release it, even after the Senate passed a motion demanding its release [2].

[1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2013/results/sen...

[2] http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/550114/electoral_com...
EXTERMINATE. EXTERMINATE.
The whole point (in the short term at least) of teaming up with IBM is to sell iOS devices by the hundreds or thousands to enterprise clients that might otherwise not accept BYOD.

Apple has already been doing a lot of work over the last couple of years geared towards making iOS more acceptable to enterprise and we're clearly going to see even more progress in that direction.

Say what you will about the quality of IBM's software and services, IBM probably understands enterprise-scale IT better than anyone else. A lot of that knowledge is now going to be transferred to Apple, as iOS and the related infrastructure is brought up to the standard that IBM clients will demand for this to work.
How is this different from existing PACS applications such as what eHealth Technologies offers?

http://www.ehealthtechnologies.com/solutions/health-informat...
Total guess: Google wanted a world where Google could sell real, identifiable people to advertisers. Not enough real, identifiable people came to the restaurant.

At this point I doubt a name free-for-all is going to swell the occupancy.
Note that your link doesn't appear to say anything about that. Might you be seeing an internal revision? (The current revision visible to the public appears to predate the policy change; perhaps a new version was meant to be pushed but has not been.)
I generally agree, but I feel like there is less skepticism than you portray among the ML/Stats community about probabilistic modeling languages (hence the DARPA call for white papers). Universal inference for well-posed models is ambitious, but a lot of people have worked hard, with significant success, to make it happen.

The Geman and Geman paper from 1984 was directed at general procedures for inference using sampling, as was the work of the Brown group (Grenander et al.) throughout the 80s and 90s. BUGS (http://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/software/bugs/) was specifically directed at that goal, and has been highly successful in real applications since the mid-1990s. Other more recent software, like Stan (http://mc-stan.org) is also targeted at this approach.

Looking at this from a different angle, the published work of many ML researchers has been directed at unifying common models with the clear view of producing software. I'm thinking about Michael Jordan's "plate" notation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_notation) and the various unifying reviews of multi-component models and inference algorithms for time series (e.g., http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=309396), and the corresponding reviews for the EM algorithm done by Meng, van Dyk, and others (e.g., http://www.stat.harvard.edu/Faculty_Content/meng/JCGS01.pdf).
The article mentions "Keyspring" as the YC alumnus donor. I'm guessing they mean the great guys at Teespring instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7629630
Personally, I don't think you should use DNS at all for intra-network service communication. I think the naming scheme described in the article is useful for humans, but for services trying to connect to other services, I would stick with hardcoding or Zookeeper.
OK, just noticed Josh Taylor posting this article on ZDnet in the same minute as this comment's parent: http://www.zdnet.com/au/government-blocks-aec-source-code-re...
A lot of people seem to dismiss this as a bad idea, but it makes sense to me. I see it as IBM becoming the "SourceBits for Enterprise Customers" [0]. They just add another zero or two on their hourly rate and package it up into a "solution".

Also, the article mentions retail as an initial target industry. Their Websphere platform powers some big ecommerce sites [1]. Now they can go after those customers and sell them mobile retail solutions. Plus it's probably a big F&B for the sales team selling Websphere.

I'm sure the same goes for any commercial "products" IBM has for banking/travel/healthcare. Even if they just act as "implementation providers" for 3rd party products, to be able to say "choose us because we will also build you an iPad app for your BIGHealthDataSystem install" is pretty huge.

Also, this is great for iOS developers because there will be more jobs available.

Hopefully (and I'm reaching on this one), it also means IBM will create/contribute to more open-source iOS/Obj-C/Swift projects and tools.

[0] http://www.sourcebits.com/

[1] https://www.sparkred.com/blog/2013-leading-ecommerce-platfor...
> "I am advised that publication of the software could leave the voting system open to hacking or manipulation".

Certainly reminds me of this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/463/ It sounds like security...
The FDA recently announced that they do not plan to regulate medical device data systems.

http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulationandGuidanc...
To be fair, lotus notes was awful before IBM bought it.
> The algorithm is public

Clearly so -- except the AEC explicitly say "The algorithm is the trade secret."[1] Which to me says they don't know what algorithm means.

[1]: http://easycount.mjec.net/2013-12-09-aec-to-mjec.pdf at paragraph 57.
I mean that big ideas rarely pay off in the short term. Many of us need to dirty our hands with mundane human concerns in order to survive, even if we are focused on ideas rather than events or people. I'm sure Swisher is not planning on switching to research.
I'm not sure what industries you work in, but it's Apple that, in the last 5 years, has made inroads into corporations that 5 years ago wanted nothing to do with them, and were completely dedicated to their blackberries. I assure you, for better or worse, those corporations have not replaced their blackberries with windows phones or android systems, and in the tablet division, there is only one player, the iPad. Good Technologies shows that Apple now has north of 90% penetration in Fortune 500 companies.

Samsung's Knox Platform is likely going to bring a lot more competition to bear, particularly now that Google has partnered closely with them - so things are certainly going to heat up soon.
Learn to Think Like an Android Developer
@mjec,

"I am advised that publication of the software could leave the voting system open to hacking or manipulation"

Shouldn't this "advice" demand substantiation or evidence? Surely it's not enough for one to just get "advice" right? If so then any Joe could lie to this officer and they could write the same thing.

Also, what does that bit about "commercial-in-confidence" mean?
I totally agree, I just thought it was odd that the article didn't mention it. There was a section on when SQLite might not be appropriate, but it never mentions this. Easily avoiding data loss is a huge feature for a db that's going to have any amount of production data, so if you're proposing that people use SQLite for production workloads, this should be acknowledged.
It looks a lot like the windows start menu. Which is pretty easy to use.
Service monkeys. Lordy. Those service monkeys build the infrastructure that keeps this world together.
I want to be able to change my Google+ name to a nickname, not showing my real name at all. And I want my gmail email to still come from my real name. As far as I can tell, there is no way to do that.
In their defence, in Section 15 of the FOI rejection letter, they mention the software is used for several fee-for-service industrial elections.
Wrong. The future is mobile. This is a play against Knox/Samsung.
Let's say that the software is published, and the code is audited and it looks ok - it seems to implement all of the intricacies of the transfer system and so on correctly. Then what? What if the operator forgets to use the latest version? or puts a different piece of software entirely on the counting system?

Having audited the source code really doesn't help; it won't remove the need to perform independent verification.

Similarly, merely publishing the input won't help much either; how do you verify that the published input corresponds to the actual votes? It won't remove the need for independent parties to observe the raw input (paper votes) and to make their own tallies; in which case those parties can publish their own copies.

Asking for the input to be published and the source to be published is just scraping the surface and won't add meaningful security. You need independent observation by mutually distrusting parties.
It's not a side show at all, it's the most important thing. By showing us the code the AEC is making the implicit commitment that this is the code running on their systems. Until they show us some code they are not even making that commitment at all - they could be running anything, they could change it every day to match their whims.

My own suspicion is that they DO know of numerous problems either current or past and quite likely these will cast enough doubt on some particular past results that it would bring about a constitutional crisis.
I haven't seen the "change your name" nag-dialog for some time. What bugs me the most is that I still can't comment on videos with the Youtube account event though google converted it to a Google+ account a long time ago, it's still useless.
I won't say that having my name keeps me from saying stupid things, but I do tone it down and work towards more positive posts because of it. Just like I try to do here (and often fail due to a huge, yet stupid, ego). I think everyone should have a choice but I encourage everyone to use their real name.
Good point regarding inequality vs absolute standard of living, but you're also talking about inequality within national boundaries. A good bit of the resentment of the Muslim world towards the West stems from perceived injustice and power imbalance on a regional or global scale.

There is also a big difference between inequality as a ratio of rich to poor, and actual conditions. The poor in Sweden are better off relative to the rich than the poor in Pakistan.
Yes, hn, downvote the only savvy post here. HN has no enterprise depth.
"it's obvious that you cannot produce anything nearly as compact and efficient with a compiler."

It's not obvious. We can argue over what's "nearly", but without even trying, manually converting the assembly to C I get 71 (1.5x) instructions out of gcc and that includes an inlining of animatebird. The resulting code is otherwise not so far from the original. It certainly reads more poorly, but that's to human eyes not x86. I'm not sure which would be more performant, and playing more carefully with the code and optimizations it can probably get even better.
SF's data-driven solution to an old SF problem: human excrement
I am surprised that no one has mentioned the recent cringely book on IBM, which I learned about from HN.

IBM doesn't even make their own servers anymore - selling that business to lenovo (IBM only makes mainframes).

I assume this is relatively neutral for both parties, and reflects the deterioration of technical competence at IBM.

IBM will act as a giant sales arm, and apple would fulfill whatever contract IBM can land. only question is how big the scale they can accomplish together. you would think IBM enterprise is naturally large scale but not necessarily justifying largest-market-cap-in-the-world. apple's still going to need major consumer hits to keep growing.

Apple has $574bn market cap last check, to IBMs $190bn. Apple would almost need to acquire IBM to move the needle, and selfishly, as an apple-convert, i hope they aren't actually considering that.

would be a true shame for apple to stop building the consumer products of our dreams, to build some soul-less bullshit for "enterprise" courtesy of IBM. risk of the great dream dying.

also big risk of the IBM culture and mindset infecting apple.

i'm sure steve jobs would get a huge kick out of apple throwing a lifeline to IBM, thinking back to the 80s when IBM was "big blue" and a formidable technology competitor.

i could see steve going ahead with this for kicks, which is about how i think apple is going to approach it. can't harm apple if they ring-fence the work, and don't let IBM management practices become apple practices.
I've always though the Hare Clark system is intrinsically I democratic (even though it produces reasonable results) because no one seems to understand it (certainly the people who claim to can't explain it). It's also non deterministic -- the outcome can change hassle on the order in which votes are counted (although the impact will be very small in all probability)
Wow... to be honest, it sounds like they think you might be a fool.

Here's how my instincts tell me to respond:

"Only a fool would accept increased responsibilities and the addition of being on call without more compensation. If you honestly can't afford to increase pay at all, I'd prefer to stay in my current position and continue to do the bang-up job I've been doing. If you can afford something, let's talk."

But my instincts usually get me into trouble, so I wouldn't actually say that without taking the time to think things through.

Thinking things through a bit more, I can only come to one likely conclusion. Honestly, they already think you are a fool... and are just trying to get more work out of you. What rational person would go from 40 hours a week to 40+?? hours a week (if you don't think being on-call is working extra hours, you've never done it) plus new jobs like training other people, and no additional pay?

I'd be scared if I were you. Either they are entirely stupid (possible), or they just flat out don't need you at all and consider you expendable/replaceable with the next coder that walks down the street, or they would never even ask something ridiculous. Or you've demonstrated them in the past that you were willing to accept ridiculous things, I dunno.

Are you sure they need you? If so, you have some room to be polite and not burn any bridges but stand firm that more responsibility will only be accepted with more compensation. If they don't need you, they are playing you and you should keep your mouth shut while looking for a new place to work. (and not accept the promo in as few words as possible)

Personally, I'd probably confront them about the absurdity of their proposal, but I tend to be direct like that, everyone knows where I stand when I work with them and I'm not afraid to say unpopular things. It's gotten me into trouble plenty of times; I don't necessarily recommend it.

Do what YOU think you should do, not what some stranger on the internet says. (Though sometimes I agree it's useful to hear a variety of opinions to see if you've missed any angles)

EDIT: Okay maybe I wouldn't confront them. At least not for a few days, I'd let myself cool for a while and think about it. Please don't read my post and go confront them and get fired, if you need the job that is. But don't voluntarily agree to make yourself miserable with more work for no additional benefit.
Google still won't allow their users to use the url name as my nickname

for example, my email is guest666@gmail.com, i want to use url plus.google.com/+guest666, but google won't allow me to do that, even when guest666 is available to be claim. They force me to use +(my name)
False. In the past, if your profile was suspended (for example, because of your name), it only affected your Google+ profile. Your Gmail still worked exactly the same.

Some people spread rumours in the early days of Google+ that your Gmail would be shut down if your Google+ was suspended, but that was never the case.
Anyone using CouchbaseLite?

http://developer.couchbase.com/mobile/#couchbase-lite

I see a lot of comments here about wanting a CoreData replacement that's better at sync, which is exactly the use case CouchbaseLite is meant to solve.
A smart cookie could vote in such a manner as that when the information is entered into the system, it crashes it? Maybe that's what they mean by manipulation...

Or, is it available online without any authentication other than knowing where it is? So if you know where it is, you could enter votes and then manipulate the election with those fake votes...
Why the modern bathroom is a wasteful, unhealthy design
I stopped engaging with Google properties when they changes the youtube comment system and broke it in Chrome. There's some setting about external sites or something that I could go in and change to make it work, but why should I? If they can't create a comment system that works with their own browser, and double posts everything to my g+ account I don't use, why should I bother?

It was like shoving peanuts down the throat of a person with a peanut allergy. No means no.
There is a follow up freedom of information request on trying to get some more information about that advice here https://www.righttoknow.org.au/request/documents_informing_t...
Show HN: Norby – Call your Ruby libraries from Node.js
But again, it would have been nice if the completely valid reasons why this was a knuckleheaded idea had been heeded from the get go. It was rammed through out of pure stubbornness and damaged the entire brand. I'm guessing, based on personal anecdotes, it probably hurt user engagement as well.
I don't mean any offense - but your position is not self-consistent. "Showing us the code" does not invalidate "could change it every day to match their whims".

For example the entire source code to Linux is public, but looking from the outside, you as an observer have no way to know that a particular copy of the Linux code is what is running on my laptop.

Which is why I say it's a side-show. If the source code is shabby, getting it might help a little in the short-term; it makes the whole process less reputable. But code can be rewritten. It distracts from the real need; independent verification of the process itself.