skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm interested to know what the authors think about the problem that could be called vote splitting or support buying, which would be akin to vote buying in one-person-one-vote system. This seems particularly relevant because, unlike most systems, buying the support of small numbers of voters could be useful.

Consider the case given elsewhere in this thread of 10,000 voters willing to pay only $1 against a proposal, and a single supporter. That supporter would need to pay over $100m for the measure to pass, giving each person against it at least $10,000.

Now suppose that person takes their $100m, and only purchases $25m worth of votes. They find someone else, and transfer $35m to them with the agreement that the person will buy $25m in votes, and keep the remaining $10m. A person who is only willing to vote $1 against a measure is unlikely to turn down such a deal, but it saves the lone supporter $40m.

It seems like it would be very difficult to police this, as the transfers would not necessarily need to be direct. For example, verbal agreements between the one wealthy, lone supporter and nine opponents that those opponents would get contracts in the future worth $1m each would be hard to notice, but would save the supporter $90m. An employer could give bonuses vaguely tied to the success or failure of a measure, and so on. And in all of these cases, the savings are so extreme that vast amounts could be spent hiding the fraud.

Even without buying the votes of opponents, it can be very beneficial for wealthy, motivated supporters to transfer money for voting to poorer or less motivated supporters, to move closer to the optimal funds arrangement (all amounts equal). In some cases, this could be almost indistinguishable from legitimate behavior, and would lead to all sorts of claims: is a philanthropist giving money to the poor to help them live, or to support her social agenda?

In a one-person-one-vote system, buying the votes of individuals requires mass fraud to have an impact. In QV, however, every doubling in size of a group that votes optimally doubles the number of votes they can buy at the same total cost. Thus it seems like small, motivated groups have a very, very large motivation toward fraud, while that fraud could take place at an extremely small level that would be difficult to detect. This doesn't even need to be organized: it makes sense for even a single motivated supporter to go out on their own and split their vote with one other person, perhaps a close friend of theirs.
I agree that this is probably a good rule.

On the other hand, when the mayor shows up at a police funeral to give a speech while the press is there, that's clearly a political statement. It doesn't seem fair to use the police as props (implying their support) while you have a rule saying they can't make a statement in reply.
Honestly, as it currently stands, Java appears to me as merely a pared down version of C#. C# shares nearly all of the same major features, while adding in more useful ones like properties and Linq, plus the promise of many new features on the horizon, like the null propagating operator. All of those, plus the rest of Microsoft's development ecosystem, make it a much nicer language overall.

The only reason I don't think C# has taken over Java yet is because of how entrenched Java is, and it's wide cross-platform support. With mono, Silverlight, and Microsoft's newfound love for open-sourcing however, I think those arguments would be pretty much null if Java were to be introduced today.
Even with better accountability BAD cops are just one part of a broken justice system that, with enough wealth can be bent to serve you, but with too little, or no wealth will abuse you.
Yes, that's a tricky problem. Generally GraphQL solves it by filtering on the server. You'd request something like `friends(age: 25, order: dob, first: 10) { name, profilePicture }` and pass that straight through to the UI.

There are some situations where this doesn't work to well. For search suggestions, for example, you might not want to request `searchSuggestion(query: "Tom Smi") { <lots of data> }` on every keystroke because sequential queries will have a lot of duplication. In this case we can just fetch the IDs of the results and do a separate query to fetch the data for the people that we don't know about yet.

Having the server know about client queries (and therefore preemptively running queries) is something we specifically avoided with GraphQL. If the server knows what the client wants then sending any query across the wire doesn't make sense at all. It also falls down if data requirements client changes across client versions. You quickly end up in a place where the server has to know about all possible client queries, which is complex difficult to maintain.
Ignoring of course that much of C# owes its existence to Java (and C++).
The Internet could reach its limit in just eight years, warn engineers
I don't get it. So I can randomly vote with my single vote for all the causes and get increased votes back (since somebody else may buy additional votes and the total sum for redistribution will be larger than individuals count). Or not?
True story of how an interview exploded for me:

I'm asked to code a simple matrix in java. I ask about the fill factor, and get told quite low. The constructor takes the dimension and it's assumed square. I ask the interviewer if a csc matrix is ok, and he kind of says he's not sure what a csc matrix is. I tell him it's column sparse, and proceed to quickly write out, on a whiteboard, a simple csc matrix -- basically, an array of dimension columns of ArrayList of tuple <index, value>. The constructor is pretty much

ArrayList<Tuple>[] columns;
void SparseCSCMatrix(int dim){
columns = new ArrayList<Tuple>[ dim ];
}

The interviewer then starts going at me because having, eg, a million columns requires an array with a million elements in it. I say yes, duh. He says it's quite inefficient -- what if I only use 10 columns out of the million? My response is, well, that's fine -- but what you're describing isn't a matrix. It turns out that what he really wanted was a HashMap from tuple: (x idx, y idx) to value, and that a typical load would be perhaps 1k elements in a space of 1 million by 1 million.

We then go at it about whether I should have asked him to clarify, and I basically decide I don't have to play along with stupid gotcha questions so I told him words have meanings and a "matrix" with only 10 non-empty columns is not a matrix. And I don't have time for wankers.

At least I learned what they were like fast...
This is really useful; I have been recently working on a huge c++ project and I had the exact same problem you mentioned with large vectors. The way I handled this problem was to wrap vector in a class which provides locking mechanism for expanding operations so while the vector is growing nobody can access it.
I am excited to try Rust soon.
Should there be rewards for lying?

Should there be strong encouragement to charge people for things that are effectively free?

Should the winner be whoever cut the most corners, cheated the most people, had the greatest deceptions, and paid their employees the worst?

Should we have a system where sending things around the world multiple times to be manufactured is seen as the best solution?

Should we really exalt those who provide the cheapest service at the most unreasonable price by defrauding people?

Should not taking responsibility for the consequences of ones actions be to their advantage? Should exploitation really be how one gets ahead?

Should we have a system that defines success and progress by the volume and speed of such swindlers and con-men?
That sounds like hollywood technobabble. It is not. It is gloriously, awesomely not.
For one thing, because many did not volunteer to participate in war. I'm sure you've heard stories about people coming home from Vietnam and being spit on. A lot of those people were drafted. In more recent history, most of the people sent to invade Afghanistan and Iraq joined a peacetime Army with no foreseeable major conflicts.

Feel free to criticize the soldiers themselves, of course. I just don't see the point, and I don't think you'll get very far. Even if you vilify utterly in the public mind, you'll accomplish nothing. The people who decide where to send those soldiers are the ones who count.
Hiring someone for the sake of diversity is absolutely stupid. Also, not sure what you are on about? The advice is to hire someone who you could get a beer or shoot a game of pool with after work and carry a non-awkward conversation and talk about overlapping interests. A person of any gender or nationality could potentially fit this bill.
Not at all. Java's rise was the perfect storm of several factors: object orientation taken to its logical conclusion during a huge IT hype period for it (much like "Big Data" today), the tail end of a huge explosion of CPU architectures which made VMs very attractive, and CPU power finally getting to the point where pervasive garbage collection wasn't a detriment to large systems.

The platform as we have today is simultaneously weak in terms of its stagnant and outpaced feature set, and strong in terms of its optimization capability and ecosystem size. But its strengths were a function of its popularity: lots of people wrote Java so there was plenty of incentive to invest in the platform/ecosystem.

The only way I could see it taking off today as a new language is if there were a company willing to dump 10x the resources into it that Oracle or Sun ever have.
I'm white. Systematic injustice has a funny way of being swept under the rug for years, decades and centuries when it doesn't inconvenience us or when powerful people of our race benefit from it.

Swaths of people go through this regularly or are targeted and treated, much, much worse than this guy for the sole virtue of being the wrong race. Somehow, many white people, especially those in the upper class, never have to see this injustice ever.

There's a reason MLK's strategy during the civil rights movement worked. It inconvenienced or scared white people into seeing the injustice of the system they are a part of and control.

Police brutality and injustice is a side of America we are privileged to be mostly excluded from. When it becomes our problem, the system at least attempts to correct itself.

As an aside, for many people I know, the whole police brutality meme really started brewing when it became common knowledge that cops can come into your house and shoot your dogs. It doesn't and didn't matter that has been going on for decades to those of the wrong race or religion, often with deadly consequences.
On the surface you seem to agree with the parent post.

But to be clear private companies do a great job making shoes. Lots of evedence suggests they do a poor job at making fighter jets. The problem is clearly incentives. Less well known there are also issues with private companies making army boots. And again the problem seems to be capitalism only applies when lots of little choices are being made, if each private chose his own boot from say 5 companies you would expect much better outcomes vs the current approach.

IMO, you can only call it capitolism when the government buys the same products as any other person on the market. As soon as one person is making a multi million dollar deal you lose feedback that keeps the system in check and are forced to rely on regulations. IMO, this means government contractors are inherently a bad idea.
To be fair, from the description of the job it looks like language specific skills matter.
Yep we've used a page of code from one of our systems and asked the person to talk through what they can see, what it does, what they would ask further questions about and so on. It almost instantly separates people who know a bit about code from those who don't, as the latter will literally just stare at the page for a while before giving up.
I'd like to live where you live and have your acquaintances. I live in the midwest and the adoration of police is ever so slightly lower than that for the military.
To some extent, but mostly this is long-explored territory with few dragons.

It's not often put this way, but you could say that the virtual particles < HUP establish the wavefunctions that have effects fully evaluated by the time of > HUP, such as the phase cancellations that cause light to take the path of least time, which is otherwise puzzling.
Clearly we need an api for this...
Not sure how that can be answered. How would it compete against C#, which is basically Java++, and now open source and cross platform, and mature? But C# doesn't exist without Java, which it was heavily influenced by. Scala runs on the JVM. Does Scala exist if Java is "introduced now"? Scala is also a Java++.

I mean, Java was such a major influence that you have to stipulate how we deal with the fact that Java couldn't compete now because it would be essentially competing against future, evolved version of itself.
Do you have a particular title in mind?
I think in both cases changing demographics and constituencies. Union membership and power is wanning. and in conservative circles I see the younger (and I count myself among them) being slightly more libertarian influenced, and with that slightly more skeptical of police power and government power in general.
Scuttlebutt is that Now exclusivity is only going to be three months. (Far shorter than AT&T's sweet deal.)
I'm really waiting for some piece of white trash to get into one of these COPS-style police brutality cases, just to see what the reaction would be.

My guess is, a whole lot of silence.
So, unlike swift.
By the way, can you say if we will see better scripting support (python or r) for excel? :p
And I guess if you eat other player's cell, the timeout resets... not sure.
>Could you expand on this?

Chinese is objectively quite bad in terms of language design. It's elaborated on extensively in this rather lengthy article: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
Yeah, drug-trafficking and capital punishment aside, I agree on your two points: Widodo's domestic popularity seems to be declining sharply and corrupt justice system getting stronger. We, Indonesian, experience it first hand sadly.

I am truly sorry for the Australian whose caught in the middle of this mess.
Actually responding to jjoonathan here...

Both the police and correctional officer unions often donate to the Republicans as much if not more than the Democrat politicians.
The Death of Stress Test and the Rise of the Coronary CT Angiogram (2014)
Sure, but shouldn't safety be the number one concern here? Programmers can always be trained to learn it, as long as they demonstrate competence. It seems like an unfortunate case of trying to cut costs at the cost of safety.
> And this is despite the fact that I still don’t know where that particular vector is modified or destroyed — I didn’t explore that far because I didn’t need to! (or want to :P)

I find that a bit worrying - while it might well be an example of what's technically possible in some cases of using Rust to prevent segfault-type crashes, it doesn't mean there aren't now logic errors in the code which would do something just as bad. I guess it depends on how well you know the code and the context in which it's being used.
The fix is to make individuals in the company, e.g. the directors, personally responsible. In many countries the legal framework is already in place for that.

As long as the fines are only coming from the company the only one you're really punishing are the shareholders who really have no control over the company's day to day activities and these decisions. They have no visibility into this either.

The CEO should be held responsible for any illegal activities the company undertakes under his direction as should the directors. Assuming they're aware of it. Otherwise the responsibility is probably at some lower level. This does not contradict the responsibility of the company as a legal entity which is a party to these contract.

EDIT: A decision that may cost the company 100M in fines in 10 years and help the CEO make his bonus this year is a no brainer. This is not unlike deciding to do share buybacks when you hold stock options...
I agree.

When we talk about government and big business propping each other up, I don't want to get into the chicken and egg problem of whose fault it really is (if such a thing could even be defined). I just like to address the fact that whatever the cause, government mixing with big business is not capitalism. In fact, part of the definition of capitalism the absence of government.

I guess I just get confused when people point out things that are failures of the state, blame capitalism, and then go on to blame profit, or owning businesses and capital. Indeed, part of the beauty of a free market is the power of choice. When you make all decisions through a central authority, you lose that power of choice.
I understand your anxiety on the complexity of Rust. I wonder if there were a language that fixes exactly the pitfalls of C (e.g. sane string manipulation), without adding any high level concepts, but with memory safety.

However, at the same time I think the language researchers cannot help but add abstractions on today's languages. The unusual exception was Go, but it failed to target the same niche as C/C++ at the end. Actually I think there are more people who like abstractions than those who like the extreme simplicity of C. So unfortunately, a "direct" replacement of C will not happen in the foreseeable future, I think.
A company that ignores laws it finds inconvenient, and hires rapists as drivers? Yeah sounds like the sort of company that will shape the future of autonomous cars.
Ask HN: Is my code any good?
I have written my first iOS app in Swift, a Hacker News Client for iOS. I am a beginner iOS developer. I need some feedback from the Hacker News community about my code quality so that I can improve myself in the future. Be brutal and honest about what you think of my code structure and style.The project can be found at the following URL https://github.com/NikantVohra/HackerNewsClient-iOS.If you want to take a look at the app it can be downloaded from https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hn-app/id983203003?ls=1&mt=8.
That is a gorgeous Wikipedia article. Well-cited, easy to navigate, and just the right amount of mathematical detail.
I won't put a candidate in a situation which I myself won't want to be in.

While interviewing, I tell the candidate the problem and then leave the room. He is alone and comfortable (I hope). I check back after 30 min. If not done I still give him more time.
I don't think any of the languages which were introduced 20-25 years ago would make it.

All modern languages and all current iterations of the older languages are vastly superior by every imaginable metric.

All those 1.0s from the past would look like someone's toy project, because, well, that's what they were.
> You missed the context where we're talking about a professional setting.

I didn't miss it. I just don't see why it's relevant.

Why does your ability to handle that situation differ so greatly depending on whether it's an academic or professional setting?

> You took exams in school were the professor was looking at what you were writing the entire time? Your exams were in front of several people on a whiteboard?

Well, when we give technical interviews we let the candidate sit at a desktop and we don't particularly pay much attention to what they're doing. We definitely don't just stare at them. I know that at some popular companies like Google they may use a whiteboard and they might (but might not) pay more attention as you write your code. I don't really advocate that.

I know that's not always the case, though; I interviewed at Palantir once, for instance, and one of the interviewers ignored me completely until I was ready to present my solution.

That said, in school there were in fact a few occasions when I had effectively an oral exam. There also were occasions when I needed to do some work on a chalkboard in front of several people (if not the entire class). There were some occasions when I even needed to deliver a 45 minute highly technical presentation to the class and that doubled as an exam.

> Other professions don't conduct interviews like this. Go talk to some mechanical engineers who've been working for 10 years and ask them if they interview like this.

Well, my roommate's a chemical engineer at a major oil company. For his current job, he had to give a presentation to the entire interviewing team about his technical work at previous internships. It's not an exactly isomorphic scenario, but I'm sure they paid a great deal of attention to every single thing he said.

Lawyers have to take the bar exam, which I imagine is easily just as hard as an interview at Google. It might trigger social anxiety less, but that won't last long -- by the nature of the profession, you'll be in front of the court eventually.

Doctors have to take similar exams, equal in difficulty (if not greater), plus they are observed extremely rigorously during labs and clinical work.

> If you're regularly giving me life or death tasks that I have 15 minutes to solve, I don't want to work there.

It's not that regular of an occurrence, but it would be a sort of big deal if you were totally unable to act in that sort of situation. There would be a limit in what sorts of projects you would be given.

"Life and death" is an exaggeration, though. It's not any more life and death than a 15 minute quiz.

> Pair the candidate with an interviewing engineer, give them an hour or two to solve a problem as a team. The interviewer isn't an adversary; their job is to assist the candidate like they would if they were working on a real problem.

Are you suggesting that you can perform well when you have someone helping you, but you can't when you don't? Or is it just an issue of social anxiety?
I might be very biased, personally, but I think technology would be better off if the NSF and DARPA had controlled more money than Wall Street, since I tend to think real technology development comes from research before companies are even formed.
At the risk of sounding like I'm overgeneralizing, fines and tickets should not go into the budget at all. Things like sin taxes make me uneasy. I cant believe people arent up in arms against civil forfeiture.

The problem is... Where does this money go?
Three months is enough for the Game of Thrones season to end. After which, I don't care about HBO until the next one starts :)
FEC can't curb 2016 election abuse, commission chief says
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I think I disagree. What he wanted can certainly be called a matrix. An m-by-n matrix has an entry for every (x, y), 0<=x<m 0<=y<n, but that's not a description of the way to represent a matrix in memory. That is an implementation decision. Of course I wasn't there, and I don't know the fine details that got you mad.
Entrepreneurial Tendencies Among People with ADHD
Agreed. If Java hadn't existed until now, it's entirely unclear what languages would be popular or even exist. Hell, would object oriented programming be popular, or would it be a niche paradigm?
There is also http://ggplot.yhathq.com/ which is buggy for complex graphs but rapidly getting better - indispensable for me.
Why should people express trust in you by deliberately sacrificing information relevant to their own interests before you've proven yourself trustworthy?
I can relate from interviewing several people for senior positions. Many had never heard of a linked list and didn't know how hash tables worked.
Yes, but unions are normally protecting their employees from firing for professional misconduct.

Police forces are protecting their members from being investigated for felonies. That's a little different. The only reason the police are investigated internally is because they happen to work in the same building that employs people who respond when you beat and/or murder someone.