skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
voting happens over a period of a week or two, distributing the votes nicely in time, preventing attacks, surprises and other things that can corrupt an election when it's all got to happen in one significant day.

Replying to this separately.

I disagree.

By greatly increasing the window size of the election, vote by mail greatly increases the cost of running campaigns. Leading to the money chase. So the barrier to entry for aspirants is higher. Which is just another form of corruption.

It's called ballot chasing. I both door bell and phone bank for campaigns I support. Every campaign does it. It's not cheap. And I believe (but cannot prove) it ultimately suppresses voter turn out by alienating voters by constant harassment.
Compaq and Packard Bell.
Indeed, you are bringing very interesting points:

- vertical integration (and tighter control over quality / schedules) for technology companies, and

- size/scale as an advantage in Marketplace.

We have seeing both of these in play, not just with Samsung: Apple is designing their own CPUs, and you can argue they leverage their size to help iTunes and Apple Pay businesses.

Still, there are counterexamples: NVIDIA (and many other successful companies) are fabless, and AMD divested their fabs (by splitting into AMD and Global Foundries).

What HP seem to be spinning off is their consulting arm and the enterprise hardware businesses, where vertical integration/size doesn't matter that much.
>run forwards and backwards

Half-serious: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/tardis-0.3.0.0/docs/Contr...

>probabilistic programming

https://hackage.haskell.org/package/probability

There are a number of articles about writing your own probability monad in Haskell. It's not hard.
The author makes arguments for the functionality that OOP encompasses, but doesn't attempt to explain why these should be grouped under one abstraction. Instead the author assumes that this should be the case, and rather naturally ends up with the answer of objects.

The author also has some curious opinions about FP approaches. For example, he points out that Haskell's type system distinguishes between homogenous and heterogeneous lists, but then considers this to be a disadvantage. I get the strong impression that the paper is arguing backward; assuming that the properties of common OOP languages are the ideal, and then deriving from that assumption the answer that OOP is the best paradigm.
Yes. But typically banks can leverage - for example, the bank which employs me typically lends out around $125-$135 for every $100 dollars in deposits. I guess the OP was trying to explain the money multiplier but got the example wrong.

(Money multiplier is the inverse of the reserve requirement)
It sounds like one of us doesn't know what they are talking about, and I don't think it's me. How does, say, Pret a Voter rely on hash collisions to protect voter privacy?
Display timelines on your website from different social networks
What about http://strawpoll.me/ ? Is there something that your site does differently than that one? Heres the same poll at strawpoll: http://strawpoll.me/2716564 so you can compare. This site is commonly used at twitch.tv so that the streamer can ask the viewers a question, all results update in real-time. I have seen thousands of people use it simultaneously with no problem.
Awesome, thanks for the response--I'm not a DBA, so I'm having to try and play catchup. :)

How do you (or others?) feel about foriegn keys? They seem like a really good idea for read-heavy workloads and for documentation and maintenance and interop with tools, but for write-heavy loads leaving them off seems to have non-trivial performance benefits (reference case is 9.2 PGSQL, if it matters). Again, my instincts are that they're probably the right thing to do, and that removing them later is going to be easier (if it turns out we need to) than trying to shoehorn them in too late.
Surely I, as an individual, could not just go and demand to see and count all the ballots myself.

Different jurisdiction, different rules, so YMMV (at least in the USA). Sometimes manual recounts are automatically triggered for highly contested races. And sometimes campaigns can pay for a recount.

I would need to turn to somebody I trust.

The system I "trust" is mutual distrust. If all the candidates (campaigns) agree on the count, then I am much more likely to accept the final tally.

Whenever someone in election administration says "trust us", I know I'm being conned.
Looks like it's back. Agilent is spinning off the measurement group into a company called Keysight. Announcement was 2 weeks ago.

http://www.agilent.com/about/companyinfo/company-separation....
Now only if telecoms and cable companies would hop on the bandwagon :)
You've just added a bunch of weight and lost a whole bunch of energy in the process. (EDIT: vs. just not using electrical motors. vs. batteries it really depends on the specifics but if you could get what you get out of a battery with a turbine of lesser weight then presumably we'd all have little turbines in our iPhones and electric cars)
Gothenburg, the happy town in Sweden
> I actually haven't, because in the case of let's say, programming, I learned most everything myself. I read and google'd instead of bothering other people for every little problem.

There are many ways to learn, and not everyone is capable of teaching themselves complex skills (even with access to Google). For many, social learning - being taught - is crucial.

> It's a bit rude to expect people to spoonfeed you all the way and then call them assholes when they get bored of it.

Your opinions aren't unpopular because they're wrong, and I sympathize with some of what you're saying, but statements like this (the word "spoonfeed" to describe the answer to an uneducated question in particular makes me uncomfortable) do make you sound like an asshole and someone not to be approached by a social learner.
I like those kind of posts, where something possible, becomes reality. It's just interesting to see.

I remember back in time when I was thinking what will happen when iPhone got a Windows, etc ...
I totally agree, and I'm not happy with people who spam RTFM and lmgtfy.com either, but I still think that they have a point.

The problem is the sheer number of people who do not know they can just use Wikipedia and Google, all of they who ask one question and either never reply again or ignore advice no matter the form.

But perhaps you're right, maybe if the "assholes" as Emile Petrone call them tried to be more gentle, people would actually listen to them.
Kind of, sort of, but not really. The $90 that was lent, at some point, winds up back in a bank, where that loan is now a new deposit. Then 90% of the $90 can once again be lent out. Now that original $100 deposit = $171 in loans. And on it goes, until that $100 deposit is roughly $1000 floating around in the economy. This is called the "money multiplier".

Here's a chart that shows the expansion potential of money at various reserve requiements: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_reserve_banking#medi...

This also shows how banks make so much money, and why there are both laws and services designed to encourage people to keep their money in banks. A $100 deposit generates slightly less than $1K in loans. At only 5% interest, the banks will realize $50 in interest per year on the ~$1K in loans enabled by that single $100 deposit.
Ask HN: Is there a hacker news toolbox? Pls validate the idea
Inspire by two recently HN posts.

If the answer is yes, I'd like to use that toolbox to check whether a toolbox already exists and no need to ask the question :)

What are you working on? A hacker news toolbox

Who would use your product?

1) "Any hackers wanting to build some new stuff would better check this toolbox. If there is one satisfying your needs, then pls don't reinvent the wheel unless you have good reasons.

2) Any hackers wanting to find some tools for their needs can check this toolbox. There are some great tools which are hard to be discovered as time goes because not every tool can make them famous, e.g. small audience. But you may need it someday."

How do you know customers need what you're making? How do you know people want this?

1) "Had I known about this I probably wouldn't have built Poll... I just wanted something elegant that didn't require registration... Good work!" poll.lab.io said this to tally.tl. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8412791

2) "I'm looking for a plugin posted here some time ago. There was a little plugin posted here a little while ago, probably not longer ago than at most 2 months." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8409646"
A relative of mine with credible information tells me HP is apparently losing a bunch of ground in the server market because of low build quality. HP's trying to compete on prices by slashing them, but their deployments are just that bad.
Thats a good point - looks like it's built on Rails too. Switch this to Node and React and it'll smoke. With Node it would also be super easy to use websockets and remove the need for Pusher too.

Not a big deal though - this is a really nice app. I just like talking about different frameworks and tools.
The style reminds me of Cave Story. Great stuff!
It’s a very interesting idea. Would it work accurate enough when scaled to 160+ languages?
something something Fourier transform.
+1. Information can be very powerful. At this era, we have the opportunities to bring information to people need them with very low cost. This will change the world. I'm a believer and working on it. There are so many things we can do. Good luck!
I'd be crazy to bet on such a volatile asset even for 30 minutes (BTC value changes often far exceed transfer fees), so every simple transfer turns into a bet, which I'm willing to pay to avoid. Not to mention that Bitcoin isn't liquid in many currencies.
The next step is building out a basic app that will display the metrics being tracked by the sensors and using that information to provide adaptive programming. To understand what I mean by adaptive programming take a quick look at fitstar.com. I wan't to build a very basic form of that functionality, but the beauty is users won't have to stop and manually record their exertion level, repetitions, and working time between each exercise. My machine will automatically track those metrics, so the experience is seamless.

Based on your feedback and the feedback of others, I'm going to pull the trigger and start setting up meetings with investors. I think that's a logical next step and finding good people is something that I can continue to focus on in parallel to other things.

I'm in Mississauga, ON.
MR is a pretty inflexible paradigm, and doesn't really suit graph problems well at all. Most people I know prefer to use Spark (or in the case of graph problems, giraph). Of course this is for huge graphs that won't fit on a machine (petabytes). If it fits on a machine it's far easier to not muck around with distributed computing.
The most amazing thing for me of the piece is the realization that HP still had $110B+ in revenue last year - its a useful reminder to us (put myself squarely in this category) of some of the behemoths in the valley that get short shift at times in the "Silicon Valley" PR ecosystem. There's apparently some interesting research still going in HP labs - one smart friend moved out here to work on Memristors with them (over multiple alternatives), because they had backed the work for a while.
Ok here is my 2 cents. The reason I feel Bitcoin has lost so much over the last couple of months is because in some ways its a victim of its own success. The more merchants that come online and support BitCoin payments the faster its going to drop in value. The reason is simple, supply & demand and bitcoin payment/exchange gateways. When merchants say they are accepting Bitcoin as payment they aren't really, they are simply using Bitcoin as a conduit to process the payment from you the customer with Bitcoin. When a merchant uses a Bitcoin payment gateway, upon receiving Bitcoin payment, the gateway immediately turns it into a fiat currency by hitting the buy side of an exchange. They are putting more bitcoins back into circulation, in other words increasing the SUPPLY of Bitcoin. Its Economics 101 increase the Supply of any commodity, and the price goes down.
On the other side of the equation, the investors who are buying and holding Bitcoin, with the expectation of it going higher, are seeing it plunge, so what they are doing is buying more goods and services instead of holding, a way to get 'out' of their position if you will, and that further drives the price down, its a vicious cycle.
When will the price of Bitcoin start going back up? Who knows, for me I feel the indicator will be similar to observe the relative strengths of the fiat currencies, in times of peace or economic uncertainty ( not now ) they tend to show weakness, and traditionally speculators will find safe haven in gold, I think some may try to weather the storm in Bitcoin as well. Unfortunately that is not the case at the moment, both US and Canadian economies seem to be doing well, partially because of the 'war' the US is currently waging. So for me I think I'm going to sit on the sidelines and wait.
OpenBSD 5.6: What will be there
No, you would need a larger monetary base to support the same size economy. But printing more money is easy.
Wordpress plugin preventing me from posting
There seems to be a new plugin that that is stopping me form making any posts on sites that have it enabled. It says:

ERROR: Your comment appears to be spam. We don't really appreciate spam here.

Please go back and try to say something useful.

I have tried:

1. new IP
2. putting in a random .edu url for the email
3. no url
4. rewording comment which is not spam and is 200 words in length

any ideas?
Disastrous. Thousands of container ships drop their cargo into the ocean. Oil platforms corrode and begin to leak uncontrolled. So do chemical plants all over the world. Nuclear power plants meltdown. Huge fires in cities all over the world burn uncontrolled, releasing tons of ash into the atmosphere in a short time period.

In the long term, invasive species we've already introduced take over. Domestic animals like cats and dogs will kill off most the wildlife before starving to death.
it's not censorship, the story is still in the archives, it's still on the web, it's just not broadcast on google.
Reminds me of Worldbuilder [1], a scifi short about a VR interface for editing the world around you.

I kinda like the "grab object & kiss to save" gesture: it wouldn't make sense in 2D but feels natural in VR, although "grab & push object in your brain" might be easier implement to represent a save function.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzFpg271sm8
I didn't consider hosting from GitLab at all. The thing I considered was that GitLab is an open-source project, so I can modify it the way I want ( I actually contributed a super small patch ( https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlab-ci-runner/pull/16 ) .

Anyway free hosting for me for a platform that you can install on your server has always been a no-option, because I want to control the content.
The thing I find interesting is how thin the order book is:
https://www.bitstamp.net/market/order_book/

It shows that you don't need to sell a particularly large block of btc to substantially move the price in either direction. If one big buyer jumped into the market it could easily move the price $50+. This shows that bitcoin is still immature and in its infancy. The more the liquidity of bitcoin grows, the less this kind of volatility will plague the market.
Personally, I am hoping for "H" and "P".
How does pret a voter protect voter privacy in a voter pool (precinct) of 400 with a ballot containing 30 issues.

Go ahead, work it out for yourself, manually, like I did.

I'll wait.
> Anecdotally speaking, such people know more than a beginner, but are very, very far from being an expert themselves.

I've met some assholes who are experts. It's just that real experts are rare, asshole or not.
It can have its downsides. For example Nvidia didn't manage to push 16nm chips into their latest Maxwell cards because plants that they use for manufacturing were already booked ahead. Intel on the other hand use their own plants and can decide things more flexibly.
Nice article. I got too far into it before realizing I was essentially tricked into reading an academic paper :) There seems to be a tradeoff between clear presentation of an idea and the formalization required to usefully build off of it/publish it. Abstractions which do both (e.g. Turing machines) get more reuse, I think.

The sublogarithmic result is constructive, though, and my understanding of it is like this: We can split up a decision problem (take in a string, give a yes/no answer) over many workers by splitting up the input string into sqrt(n) chunks of size sqrt(n) each and using a shared working space. The first worker handles the first chunk with a blank working space, the second worker handles the second chunk with finished working space from the first one, etc. until the last worker handles the last chunk, with the second-to-last's working space, and gives a yes/no answer. This can be parallelized into a single MapReduce round by instead having every worker process their chunk using every possible configuration of the shared working tape. This sounds like a lot of work, but if shared working area is sublogarithmic in size, calculating such a table fits within polynomial time and sqrt(n) space. This means that one final "reduce" step can take the working space from the first input chunk, pass it through the second input chunk in constant time, and so on until it can make a decision.

I can't think of any practical sublogarithmic space problems off the top of my head but evidently there are some good ones in graph theory. If you tried to implement the above in practice, you could imagine that the final reduce step could be intelligent about combining the processing stages so workers don't need to calculate every single configuration.

What is unclear to me is whether all Turing machine deciding languages in sublogarithmic space can be chunked in this way. The usual definition of an input read head is that you can go left or right whenever you want, but having access to the entire input means that the workers can't be cleanly chunked. You could say the input is one-way like a DFA/PDA, but is there a result that these are equivalent with sublogarithmic scratch space?
I see, thanks for the clarifications.

> having no global variables, just lexical variables at the top level

That is what OCaml does. Compare Racket:

Welcome to Racket v5.3.6.
> (define (countdown n) (if (> n 0) (cons n (countdown (- n 1))) '(LiftOff)))
> (countdown 10)
'(10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 LiftOff)
> (define cd countdown)
> (countdown 10)
'(10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 LiftOff)
> (cd 10)
'(10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 LiftOff)
> (define (countdown n) (if (> n 0) (cons n (countdown (- n 2))) '(LiftOff)))
> (countdown 10)
'(10 8 6 4 2 LiftOff)
> (cd 10)
'(10 9 7 5 3 1 LiftOff)

to OCaml:

OCaml version 4.01.0

# let rec countdown n = if n > 0 then n :: (countdown (n - 1)) else [0];;
val countdown : int -> int list = <fun>
# countdown 10;;
- : int list = [10; 9; 8; 7; 6; 5; 4; 3; 2; 1; 0]
# let cd = countdown;;
val cd : int -> int list = <fun>
# cd 10;;
- : int list = [10; 9; 8; 7; 6; 5; 4; 3; 2; 1; 0]
# let rec countdown n = if n > 0 then n :: (countdown (n - 2)) else [0];;
val countdown : int -> int list = <fun>
# countdown 10;;
- : int list = [10; 8; 6; 4; 2; 0]
# cd 10;;
- : int list = [10; 9; 8; 7; 6; 5; 4; 3; 2; 1; 0]

which is way better in the "principle of least astonishment" department (at least in that case).
>There are many ways to learn, and not everyone is capable of teaching themselves complex skills (even with access to Google). For many, social learning - being taught - is crucial.

And that's perfectly fine, it's not my place to tell people how they should be learning.
What I'm trying to say, is that the simple skills, the basics, the 101 is something you should be able to find on your own. Because often it really is the first result on Google, without exaggerating. I don't mind at all teaching and talking to people, that's much more enjoyable and does work better for some poeple.

>but statements like this (the word "spoonfeed" to describe the answer to an uneducated question in particular makes me uncomfortable) do make you sound like an asshole and someone not to be approached by a social learner.

I'm sorry about that. I'm being particularly blunt to get my point across, maybe I shouldn't.

What bothered me is that it seemed to me, and perhaps I'm wrong, that the author was being unfairly aggressive and judgmental without trying to understand the position of the very people he's insulting.
For developers: These shirts make you look better than your code – ShirtJS
> The more merchants that come online and support BitCoin payments the faster its going to drop in value

I don't know enough to say it definitively, but this may be pure fantasy. Merchants "accepting Bitcoin" seems, to me at least, like a publicity stunt to attract the young, techno-hipster crowd, which is valuable for marketing. I wonder if "accepting Bitcoin" translates to actual high-volume transactions. I think this drop is just business as usual for Bitcoin, which tends to rise and fall according to the publicity it gets. Also, its trading volume is still sparse enough for random noise (or deliberate manipulation) to change the price significantly.
Lossy compression of bilevel images based on Markov random fields [pdf]
This early with only you doing everything, you need to pick is your product for consumers or is your product selling to gyms. It seems you've had some success selling to gyms, so would think your traction is showing you may want to continue down that path. Not sure if you have shipped a physical product yet, but it's hard enough getting one version right, let alone two.

If you go consumer, crowdfunding for the consumer side is the way to go. I would think if you had a successful crowdfunding campaign, you would be able to convince a good technical guy to join you (as clearly you've done a ton of hustle on your own).

From the fundraising perspective, at the this early of a stage investors mostly are investing in the team (which right now is only you), unless your product/traction is through the roof. At the early stage is also when you get most heavily diluted, so want to think about how much you are giving up vs. how much do you really need the cash? Again, it sounds like you have traction, so may want to figure out how to keep bootstrapping this vs. taking a big hit equity wise.

feel free to hit me up (email in profile) - I love the space you are going after.
The easier it gets to buy Bitcoin, and accept Bitcoin, the worse it will be. Even if you wanted to spend Bitcoin, you had to think ahead. Now Circle lets you buy within minutes (in most cases) of setting up your account. On the other side of things, Bitpay and Coinbase let merchants convert back to USD (or other currency) right away. So it's possible to do "just in time Bitcoin": Bitcoin is merely the payment protocol.

When Bitcoin becomes a pure cash equivalent, no one will care about the price. I believe that once the price becomes irrelevant, it'll trend downward. I think it'll take something serious to move the price upward, like a serious event creating major doubt in USD.

Most of the bulls are quick to conflate the advantages of the protocol, as if that magically makes it more valuable as a traded commodity. Bitcoin is simultaneously a currency and a protocol. I believe when it was hard to obtain, the use of a store of value held the most potential, and early risk takers had an opportunity for reward. It's entirely possible, as the protocol becomes more or more utilized, those days of risk and reward are well behind us.