Seattle-area voters to vote by smartphone in district election - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2020/01/22/798126153/exclusive-seattle-area-voters-to-vote-by-smartphone-in-1st-for-u-s-elections <comment><USER2> This is for a voluntary county board position without regulatory power that by statute needs to be elected by March when no one is paying attention. So someone decided to try this out.

OTOH, the WA Sec. of State opposes mobile/online elections due to security concerns, as does her upcoming political opponent [1] and FWIW the Seattle Times recently wrote an Editorial also opposing the practice. [2]

Bottom line, this hardly constitutes some trend that WA state is moving towards, just something set up by a county office that is otherwise drawing skepticism.

[1] [https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle- news/politics/secretary...](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle- news/politics/secretary-of-state-questions-online-mobile-voting-plan-in-king- county-race/)

[2] [https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/editorials/resist- push-...](https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/editorials/resist-push-for- online-ballot-box/)

<comment><USER3> "the WA Sec. of State opposes mobile/online elections due to security concerns, as does her upcoming political opponent"

Sounds like nothing but a combination of thinly veiled voter suppression or technophobia, either of which should disqualify someone from public office in the eyes of an educated voter.

<comment><USER4> And this sounds like the opinion of someone who has spent literally zero time investigating how universal the consensus is among voting security professionals about how paper is still the best, most reliable, most secure technology with which to run elections.

<comment><USER3> In-person voter fraud isn't that difficult, and especially in Washington people get packets in the mail they can vote with by returning in the mail which would be pretty easy for someone to go swiping from mailboxes. Verifying identity online is not an impossible challenge and we can't just avoid improving anything forever.

<comment><USER5> It's a lot easier to hijack online voting infrastructure than it is to start digging through everyone's mailboxes at the correct time when they happen to actually be sending a ballot out.

The voting period in Washington is 18 days. So someone would have to either be constantly looking through my mail for the better part of three weeks, or have the best luck when it comes to predicting when I would actually send it out, and that's if they got the correct mailbox and I didn't, say, go to a post office or the ballot dropoff boxes. It would be hard to do even for an individual, and much harder to scale up.

<comment><USER6> To corrupt the vote, just offer some money for every empty ballot that gets sent to you to fill in and mail. There are a lot of people who would trade their ballot for a $20 bill.

<comment><USER7> Good luck scaling that far enough to make a difference, without at the same time broadcasting your intentions to everybody.

<comment><USER6> Just give a website address that displays a rotating physical address in Russia or China. Rely on the free PR from all the news stories about how terrible it is to scale with minimal "marketing" costs.

If you picked the right districts, it wouldn't even cost that much to tilt the votes in your favor. At $50/ballot you'd almost certainly get 11,000 extra votes in Michigan - enough to swing the state in the last election at a total cost of just over half a million dollars.

This ease of abuse is one of the many, many reasons that I support a single, national vote for president over per-state winner-take-all electoral college voting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I want to point out that voting in Washington state is incredibly easy. They mail you a ballot, and a packet with detailed information on every single candidate and issue, and then you can drop your ballot just about anywhere - supermarket, mailbox, probably the street (who knows). It's probably the best voting system, hands down.

I don't buy that a smartphone magically hits some convenience threshold that turns out voters.

<comment><USER9> > _It 's probably the best voting system, hands down._

The disadvantage to this system is the erosion of the secret ballot. Someone ( _e.g._ an employer, spouse or friend) can now ask you for proof of your vote.

(I think absentee ballots should be voidable in person.)

<comment><USER10> I'm missing something... how does mailing your vote allow somebody to demand that vote be exposed? If my employer asks me how or if I voted in VA (in- person paper), I tell him to fuck off. If my employer asks me how or if I voted in WA (mail-in paper), I tell him to fuck off.

<comment><USER11> An abusive wife can force her husband to vote for X and mail the envelope in front of her. She couldn't do that if the husband was voting alone in a booth.

<comment><USER12> The problem of spouses beating spouses into voting differently (or parapalegics having their votes manipulated) is not on the same level of low voter turnout. Mailing in WA ensures much higher participation than the possible outlier manipulations that _might_ happen (the number of calls about some ex-spouse having manipulated spousal votes is in the number of 0/yr for King County, WA). You get a tracking stub, by which you could contact the election board, if that was really an issue and...it's not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI) hopefully they don't prove Tom Scott right.

</comment><comment><USER14> > King County voters will be able to use their name and birthdate to log in to > a Web portal through the Internet browser on their phones, says Bryan > Finney, the CEO of Democracy Live, the Seattle-based voting company > providing the technology.

If they mean that there is a public URL you go to, and then on the site only have to enter you birhdate and name to log in, and then you can vote--that can't be right. There's gotta be more than that.

My guess is that what has been lost in the stories is how you get the URL. I'm guessing that they either email you the URL or they send physical mail which includes a QR code with the URL, and the URL contains some sort of unique per voter identifier (hopefully randomly generated anew for each election). When you go to vote the site knows who you are supposed to be from that identifier in the URL, and the name/birthdate is just for a consistency check.

<comment><USER15> > There's gotta be more than that.

I mean I agree but this is how in-person voting works right now. The only "secret" information is my polling place but anyone who knows my name can figure that out since the voter records are public and includes my address.

<comment><USER14> In Washington state it wouldn't be quite that easy. You either have to show an acceptable photo ID to vote in person, or you have to sign a ballot declaration and then cast a provisional ballot which will be accepted if the signature on the declaration matches the signature on your registration record [1].

[1] [https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=29A.40.160](https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=29A.40.160)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In related news, Saudi Arabia hacked Bezos' phone: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22122779](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22122779)

Could a similar hack be done on a larger scale, and used to alter votes before they are sent, without changing the electronic signature?

Lets assume no until proven otherwise. And if proven otherwise, lets assume it was an isolated incident, and it won't happen again after a "commitment to do better".

Lets also assume Mr. Tusk's firm can be trusted - after all, why _not_ put a private middle-man between voters and elections? As Mr. Tusk correctly points out, the only plausible explanation to resistance is wanting to suppress voters.

<comment><USER17> This doesn't even need hacking. You just go on facebook and find someones name and birthday and vote as them.

<comment><USER18> Actually the voter database is public record[0], and it includes birthdays. This means that it would be easy to have 100% turnout in the first few seconds of the polls being open.

[0]: [https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/vrdb/extract- requests.aspx](https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/vrdb/extract-requests.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I hope someone hacks the vote to make Mickey Mouse or some other stupid name win.

Phone voting is a cybersecurity nightmare.

<comment><USER20> Why would someone need to do any "hacking", if the only thing needed to vote is name and date of birth. Someone could easily aggregate all that data and write a short python script to do all the voting on everyone else's behalf.

Not advocating for anyone to do so, as this is extremely illegal, but imo whoever signed off on this kind of online voting system is an even bigger criminal in my eyes.

EDIT: upon reading further comments, I discovered that voter registration records in WA are officially public, and they include names and DOB (among other things). I am speechless.

<comment><USER19> Under US law 'unauthorized access of a computer system' is hacking, so writing someone elses name and DOB would qualify as 'hacking' in the legal sense.

<comment><USER20> My bad, I guess I misunderstood what you were saying.

I was just trying to make a point that there is no usual "evil hackers trying to break into our systems" kind of situation. It's like stealing someone's car by simply entering the wide open door and turning the keys someone left in the ignition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Being that the main driver behind this seems to be voter turnout, I have some suggestions:

1) Stop making all these penny ante jobs elected positions. These people are bureaucrats. Let them apply for their jobs like every other bureaucrat. If 99% of voters are saying they de facto don't care, maybe you should take the message.

2) For jobs that _do_ matter, make voting compulsory.

Bonus point: have elections on the weekends when people actually have time to vote. Very few people need two days to drive their buggy in from the farm anymore ffs.

<comment><USER7> Compulsory voting only makes sense if you allow _" I don't know"_ as an answer. There's no value in demanding an answer for me when I know I don't have an informed answer to give.

<comment><USER21> Compulsory voting tends to mean that you're required to put a ballot into a box. You can fill it out properly, draw a smiley face on it or leave it blank. Nobody's checking your work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I like the pageantry and ceremony of paper ballots at specific voting locations followed by manual paper ballot counting. I know in principle it's easy to automate this away by introducing online voting and other things ... I think those things will further alienate people from their local communities and society at large.

Keep paper ballots because they are inefficient.

<comment><USER23> The problem is then what do you do with low voter turnout? The article says that this election has in previous years resulted in <1% of eligible voters. That is clearly untenable.

<comment><USER22> >The problem is then what do you do with low voter turnout?

What's the problem with low voter turnout? If someone doesn't feel like voting, they should have that right. A non-vote is a vote of confidence that you are OK with any choice.

In fact, high voter turnout is usually indicative of major societal divisions or issues (case in point, the upcoming national election will probably have HIGH voter turnout as anti-Trump and pro-Trump people will turn out in droves).

> The article says that this election has in previous years resulted in <1% of > eligible voters. That is clearly untenable.

Why is it untenable? What is the harm? The alternative is you force people to vote, and they'll vote by choosing a name randomly from a list.

<comment><USER24> You're looking at it backwards. Democracy draws its power from the "consent of the governed", not from the complacency of the subjects. Remember the whole "taxation without representation" thing back when this democracy thing was getting started? Government is a tool of the people, and if the people chose to not engage in the process, the government has no legitimate claim by which it can act on the people's behalf.

The government doesn't ask for your consent, it assumes it, and the only method by which you can directly withhold consent is to refuse to participate in their political process. Low voter turnout is an indicator of an illegitimate government, which no longer has the consent of the people to continue governing them (At least in a democracy).

*Edit: If people chose to not vote (or engage in other political actions) the question should be "do we need this part of the government" not "how do we get more people to vote in this part of the government"

<comment><USER22> >Democracy draws its power from the "consent of the governed"

OK. I believe I'm arguing for consent.

>not from the complacency of the subjects

That's a red-herring. It has nothing to do with anything.

>and if the people chose to not engage in the process, the government has no legitimate claim by which it can act on the people's behalf.

If they choose to not engage because they don't trust the system .. then sure, that's a problem. If they choose to not engage because they are fine with any outcome - I don't see the problem.

> Low voter turnout is an indicator of an illegitimate government

You can't just say things. Sometimes that may be the case. And sometimes it may not. Typically in western nations, low voter turnout stems from a comfortable, prosperous life.

>If people chose to not vote (or engage in other political actions) the question should be "do we need this part of the government" not "how do we get more people to vote in this part of the government"

Sure. And I'm not against either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I still don't get what this has to do with smart phones. The article says you log in through a web based portal. They made a mention of phone apps though. I don't understand why voting would only be accessible by phone and not a normal computer.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is idiotic beyond belief. Unless you have a verifiable, re-countable paper trail, elections can be made to go whichever way the person running the elections wants them to go. It's as simple as that.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised though. I vote in WA and most people on the ballot seem profoundly unqualified for the positions they're running for. For me it basically boils down to picking the person with the most robust education credentials, unless they're a commie, in which case I pick the next best thing. It's pretty bad. If I were hiring for myself, I wouldn't hire most of these people.

</comment><comment><USER27> It sounded like a really silly verification system. Matching finger signatures on a smartphone with previous records?

Perhaps the voters should get a set of one-time codes along with a PIN from the voting office, and use that to validate their vote.

<comment> y-c-o-m-b Yeah the PIN would have been a smart choice. They already have mail-in ballots which means they could just as easily be given a PIN on the ballot they already receive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Me and 10,000 of my bots would like to participate in this election.

<comment><USER29> I'm pretty sure there is a competing botnet that would be happy to override votes of your botnet. If online votes are counted only once, then what matters is which botnet is faster and has a better link to the voting servers. High Frequency Voting, in other words.

<comment><USER28> Haha, you're right! So, as always, it boils down to an arms race between the two sides. So keep an eye on who's leasing office space near the voting server data centers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Vote is the new app that makes voting easy. No more paper booklets full of legal mumbo jumbo. Just press the Vote button and Vote does the rest, done and done.

Vote automates your votes by choosing the best candidates for you using SocialAI technology.

<comment> dane-pgp I guess you're being satirical, and maybe not everyone appreciates that, but you raise an interesting idea. Could AI (or rather, some simplistic machine learning algorithms) help to inform voters about which candidates share the same values as them, or what position on a ballot proposition they should take to be consistent with other views they have expressed?

Of course, that might end up putting a lot of power into the hands of the people making the algorithms, but if the training data and source code were transparent, and the output of the algorithm included a human-readable explanation for its recommendation, then it might actually be a better system than people voting the way they are told to by the only newspaper or TV station that they read/watch. (People should still then go to a ballot box and cast their vote on paper, though).

Here is a TED talk which introduces this idea:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyGWML6cI_k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyGWML6cI_k)

<comment><USER30> That sounds super scary to me. I mean where do you get the information that informs expressions you might make on the internet? Is it those same newspapers and TV stations? Other places where you self-selected to go? If so, whats the difference between going with the source(s) vs going with your expressions?

I'll agree that voting should be on paper. I'm not ready to boil it all down to something like a dating app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think that everything except federal elections should be done by smartphone (or mail-in for those who don't have a smartphone).

There is minimal risk that Russia cares about who serves on your local school board.

</comment><comment><USER32> Beyond the security implications (which are huge and ought to be a deal breaker on their own), this seems to have a huge problem in that it's not private.

Your abusive spouse/boss/dealer could tell you that they want to see you use the app to vote their way, and there's not much to prevent it.

While going to a local precinct is inconvenient, no one knows what you do once you walk in that booth. That's important to avoid coercion.

<comment><USER33> While I'm in total agreement, and think that this is likely a bad idea, doesn't the same problem exist with mail-in voting? An abusive party can hover over your shoulder while filling it out, and then walk you to the mailbox.

<comment><USER34> There's no solving infrequent social problems with technology, only socio- politically. I'm sure it does happen to a few people, but it sounds extremely rare.

At least a mail-in ballot usually has a "receipt," (that serial number thing that's torn off at the top/bottom) although it does little to show or prove a vote was counted, especially with the subjectiveness of interpreting handwritten marks. The bigger problem is electronic voting has no real records making it far easier to manipulate because there's nothing permanent to recount.

I suggest that to solve the receipt issue, privacy, speed of counting and accuracy to the best degree available, it's best to:

0\. Make voting day a national holiday.

1\. Mail every voter a durable, physical RFID token (signed by a closely-held private key) that has an unique code that is not recorded who it is given to. If they haven't received one before voting in-person, they can receive a random token.

2\. The voter is first checked to make sure they haven't yet voted by keeping a database of "has voted"... completely independent of actual votes.

3\. The voter either drops-off the RFID in a container in a booth for their vote preference, or they mail it sealed in two envelopes (outer mailing info, inner vote preference).

4\. Votes are counted both by weight and by RFID scanning (whole containers of votes are scanned in batch) for redundancy.

5\. Voters can check online in real-time if their vote was counted by searching for the RFID code they used.

6\. Recounts are a matter of mass-scanning large containers (with appropriate chain-of-custody) of votes.

7\. Tokens are reused to reduce waste.

<comment><USER33> +1 for election day as a national holiday; I'd even go so far as to make voting mandatory (with support for blank protest ballots, health/circumstance exemptions, etc).

That said, while the RFID system you describe seems achievable (and clearly an improvement over closed-source easily-hackable voting machines), I think it misses an important component of a democratic process: voter trust. Even if the tech is fully auditable, requiring the average voter to trust an elite technological caste does reduce trust, compared to pen and paper, which are auditable by the vast majority of citizens.

Also, the RFID can't be the only mechanism; having a fixed address can be used for authorizing identity (as with mail-in ballots), but is not and should not be a requirement to vote.

At any rate, I agree that technology is no silver bullet; solutions should be sociopolitical first, and technology is merely a tool to that end. I do think there are worthwhile innovations to consider; if anything, I'd like to disrupt polling moreso than voting, which I think has a surprising political influence both during and between election cycles, and yet which we outsource to private media companies with their own biases and incentives. If we could crack the problem of distributed identity that is resistant to Sybil attacks, we could have ongoing/persistent voting, liquid voting, public choice economics, etc, enabling more fluid feedback loops with our representatives (and maybe someday, even "pass-through" representative direct democracy).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Why is this an app? Why not web?

<comment><USER11> Today I spent quite some time looking for the mobile app created by my town to allow people to anonymously denounce street harassment and catcalling when they see it. Then I found out it's just a website, and they call that "an app" for some reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I don't understand why a bank's website is secure enough to transfer hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I can't cast a single vote online.

<comment><USER37> Because one can buy you a nice yacht, but the other can buy control over the most powerful military in the world, the stakes are just significantly larger for an election.

The reward provides a sort of ceiling on how much time and money can be spent on trying to break a system. Even if you could get access to a few billion dollars by somehow "hacking" a bank and get away with it, that means that you'd only be spending up to a few billion to do it, and you may spend a few years to plan, but not much more.

But trying to "hack an election"? I would be shocked if there weren't multiple countries spending billions of dollars across literally decades of time trying to find the best way to influence and hack elections in other countries.

Do you really think that ANY software is secure enough to withstand a team of a few thousand of some of the most talented developers money can buy working full time for decades on trying to break it? Because that's the kind of threats that elections face. And if that election happens at all on the internet, the adversaries can be literally anywhere in the world and still attack it.

There are also auxiliary reasons why electronic voting isn't ideal. It removes the ability for the average person to validate the security of their election themselves without a software engineering degree (in a paper election anyone can go watch the locked ballot box all day to ensure there is no tampering, and they can count along with everyone else at the end of the day). It introduces accessibility issues, it adds unnecessary bottlenecks and dependencies (there have been countless stories of there not being enough voting machines or them breaking down causing lines to get multiple hours long and in many cases prevent people from being able to vote before polls close. There's even evidence this has been done on purpose to sway elections by preventing people in some areas from voting as much as people in others), and it's really expensive!

And what are the benefits to electronic voting? slightly faster counting? (you can get results in minutes instead of hours...)

<comment><USER36> You have identified many problems that need to be addressed. I hope eventually the security problems will be worked out. It seems to me that online voting is a natural evolution and would certainly be more convenient for voters like myself used to doing everything online.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> [https://xkcd.com/2030/](https://xkcd.com/2030/)

</comment><comment><USER39> As a mobile developer I think this is a REALLY bad idea because of the security implications surrounding it.

<comment><USER40> As a security guy I think this is a REALLY bad idea because of the security implications surrounding it.

<comment><USER17> As a citizen I think this is a REALLY bad idea because of the security implications surrounding it.

<comment><USER41> As a different citizen, I'm not too enthused about ballot secrecy. 100% of the security issues with online voting come from the ballot secrecy requirement, so it's hard to get worked up about this.

<comment><USER42> Um? if ballots aren't secret, then individual voters can be bribed to vote the "right" way or punished for voting the "wrong" way. Ballot secrecy is an absolute requirement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> > King County voters will be able to use their name and birthdate to log in to > a Web portal through the Internet browser on their phones, says Bryan > Finney, the CEO of Democracy Live, the Seattle-based voting company > providing the technology.

Oh, really?

> Once voters have completed their ballots, they must verify their submissions > and then submit a signature on the touch screen of their device.

Huh?

> Finney says election officials in Washington are adept at signature > verification because the state votes entirely by mail. ...

Finney must have never had to sign on a phone screen with a finger while driving before.

All of this digital theater of the absurd in a desperate attempt to engage people in the political process:

> The board of supervisors election in the King Conservation District, for > example, in past years has drawn less than 1% of the eligible population to > the ballot box.

People don't vote because they don't care. Not because they can't make it to the poling place. They don't care because they don't see anything at stake.

There's no app for that.

<comment><USER44> Wholeheartedly disagree-- if casting a ballot was as easy as sending a text instead of receiving and then mailing a letter or going to a polling location, I would predict much higher participation. People don't see it worth their time because a single vote really isn't worth anyone's time. Votes only matter as groups!

So obviously you have to make it as braindead simple to vote as we have made everything else. What I do not see the purpose in, is complaining about or nay-saying these attempts. You're never going to convince someone that one vote is worth more than it is, which is what people really mean when they talk about 'engagement', because your vote on its own really just doesn't matter much and people intuitively get that.

Reducing the cost of voting to match the actual value of a single vote is the best move we have IMO.

<comment><USER45> > People don't see it worth their time because a single vote really isn't > worth anyone's time.

If someone has that worldview I'm OK with them not voting.

I'm not sure that X% more participation would improve our collective decision making. In essence we'd be diluting the vote of those who care the most with those who think voting by mail is too hard.

<comment><USER46> This. The thing about "get out the vote" campaigns is, they're intended to draw out the least-involved, least-informed members of the electorate. Which in my book is a bad thing.

Voting is not the only civic duty - educating yourself on the issues at hand is also part of that civic duty. If someone doesn't want to vote because taking the legally-mandated time off to go to the polls or fill out their mail-in ballot is "too much work," I'm not sure they're living up to their end of the bargain as a citizen.

Exercising your right to vote doesn't mean you value it. Shouldn't we be asking how we can get people to value their vote enough to be engaged?

Irrespective of that, haven't we already witnessed the mass security issues that come with making voting machines digital? Do we really want to subject that flawed scenario to even more flaws by putting it out on the web? Do we never learn?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Absolutely amazing that almost all techies in this thread are against this. Of course there is major security risks, and problems that have to be solved, but it is MASSIVELY outweighed by the fact that mobile voting would mean almost 100% voter turn out overnight if done on a national level. What are we at right now, 60% on average, maybe? Our nation's policies would change immediately with such a massive swing in voter turnout, with adjustments towards forward-thinking, liberal policies.

<comment><USER48> > Of course there is major security risks, and problems that have to be > solved, but it is MASSIVELY outweighed by the fact that mobile voting would > mean almost 100% voter turn out overnight if done on a national level

Why not just allow everyone to vote online, with no registration? Just type in your full name and select a candidate, no email or password required. It'd guarantee 100% turnout - maybe even >100% turnout, if enough bots join the fun!

The problem with digital voting is that it _cannot_ be made sufficiently secure. It's not a matter of "there are problems we haven't solved yet", but rather "there are problems that we provably cannot solve".

<comment><USER47> Sorry, but explain to me how I'm able to submit my taxes securely every year online, or pay for my marketplace insurance securely every month, but voting on our own digital devices is somehow beyond reach of what we can technically fathom?

<comment><USER49> No one has an interest in impersonating you to pay your bills.

Someone _might_ have an interest in impersonating you to steal your tax refund -- these scams do happen.

Impersonating a bunch of voters is potentially easier when you're just presenting yourself as a computer with an internet connection rather than a flesh-and-blood human body.

<comment><USER47> I'm not seeing how the verification process of making sure someone is "flesh and blood" behind their mobile app would be appreciably different than registering for a passport, for instance. A person would presumably have multiple levels of identification (state id, ssn, birth certificate) that they can send in electronically to register an account, that is then tied to a username/password/device. A "vote" would need a checkout of not only an existing account but also a new, untampered photo of your face with a piece of id, just like a real-life vote would work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Voting by mobile is extremely problematic and shocking.

1\. No paper record.

2\. No privacy.

A better way would be to use anonymous physical RFID pebbles that are placed in a container to indicate voting preference. Votes can be both weighed and scanned for counting redundancy very quickly.

Mail-in voting would consist of mailing back the pebble chit in an outside return envelope with an inner vote envelope designating the preference; the outer envelope is removed and mixed with many others before sorting.

Then later, no matter how a vote was cast, it's possible to find how a vote was counted (by the voter searching for the RFID code(s) they used) in real- time because all votes were mass-scanned in RFID containers... that is, there will be a number of large containers that contain all votes for a particular preference in a particular election. Subsequent elections reuse the RFIDs to eliminate waste. No hanging chads, no provisional ballots, no hacked voting machines and no voting by mobile.

<comment><USER19> Inner envelope would need to block RFID signals or votes could be lost based on preference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Making a big case about voter turnout not being as great as other countries is a red herring. We have it really, really good in this country. So good that, practically speaking, it doesn't matter who gets elected because things will continue to stay good. I read low voter turnout as an implicit vote of confidence in the system as a whole. You can be sure that if [stuff] was actually hitting the fan then everyone would show up to vote (and try to vote twice) to fix the horrible mess the city/state/country is in (whether in reality or perception).

While I would agree there are definite issues with security, I really don't like the "print out the digital ballots" idea would rather see something block-chain based which is public and easy to audit.

And I think it's unavoidable that some sort of biometric or other proof of identity will be required (take a selfie in order to vote!) before "voting with your phone" become commonly accepted.

<comment><USER16> Turnout can also be improved by voting on Sundays instead of work days. Yet they skipped that step and went right for electronic voting, that's nearly unanimously opposed by experts.

<comment><USER50> Even better: 11 day window for voting window, starting on a Friday and ending on a Monday. Two full weekends to vote, no excuses for not being able to make it. Some states already do this with "early voting" which starts up to two weeks before the actual election day.

And if you could pre-print your completed ballot to be scanned (once your identity if verified per local requirements) then the process could be very, very fast and efficient.

<comment><USER16> > And if you could pre-print your completed ballot

Your printer will betray you by printing invisible identifying dots on your ballot: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code)

<comment><USER51> How would that betray you? They're supposed to verify that this ballot belongs to you in the first place.

<comment><USER16> I'm confused - wouldn't that mean the vote isn't secret?

<comment><USER51> It won't go on record who you voted for, but someone at the office will have to confirm that you voted and enter in the vote. If mail-in ballots were completely anonymous, then someone could just print 10,000 copies and stuff the polls.

<comment><USER16> I thought we were talking about non-mail-in ballots, that you print at home, but submit personally.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A word counting problem – D and Haskell compared - <AUTHOR> http://leonardo-m.livejournal.com/109201.html <comment><USER2> My, doesn't the Haskell example look just perfectly horrible. Is Haskell really that bad when it comes to, you know, everyday programming and stuff?

<comment><USER3> I hope you haven't only looked at the first version, the article has two.</comment></comment>


White Americans Are Biggest Terror Threat in U.S - <AUTHOR> http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/white-americans-are-biggest-terror-threat-u-s-study-n380931 <comment><USER2> 9/11 killed several thousand in a single attack so are they saying that around what 8k have been killed in right wing terrorist attacks? since then.

And compared to real terrorist organizations like the PIRA, UDA , RAF and ETA - right wing America organizations are a joke.

<comment><USER3> No, they're saying that _since then_ , in the U.S., more people have been killed by our local breed of anti-minority crazy people than by the foreign anti-majority sort.

Blog spam points to [http://securitydata.newamerica.net/extremists/deadly- attacks...](http://securitydata.newamerica.net/extremists/deadly-attacks.html) which has a helpful table. 26 deaths by foreign (or foreign-motivated) crazies, 48 by homegrown crazies.

So the argument is that the greatest threat to U.S. citizens (minorities and govt employees) on U.S. soil is other, militant, U.S. citizens.

Which is fine as far as it goes. I don't know what agenda the New America people are pushing. But more interesting to me is that there have only been 26 killings by crazy foreign jihadists since 20010911. 26 too many, and many more injuries, but it puts things in perspective.

<comment><USER2> But thats not terrorism you might as well say that car drivers are terrorists.

And selectively ignoring a data point to make your figures look they way you want is not exactly ethical is it.

<comment><USER3> "terrorism" doesn't mean much any more.

Violence targeted against groups with different origins or beliefs for the purpose of sowing unrest and causing fear in others?

They did eliminate the Sandy Hook guy and others due to broad antisocial attitudes without specific targets. So they did make an effort of sorts...but I'm sure they have an agenda to promulgate, I just haven't bothered to read what it might be.

<comment><USER4> I think if there's any agenda, it's to look for any trends in ideological terrorism in the US.

Honestly, I think one thing the data shows that wasn't mentioned is that there's relatively little ideologically motivated terrorism in the US overall (compared to the prominent place terrorism holds in the national conversation).

This isn't to belittle the death of 74 people in terrorist attacks but once you get past the morbidity of death tolls and averages, 74 victims over 14 years (5 or so per year avg) strikes me as a fairly low number when compared to the typical weight that such attacks are given in policy discussions.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Redis 3.0.0 beta-1, with Cluster support, is out - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/redis-db/0DB1rpTE180/mPRhs45tbOAJ

<comment><AUTHOR> Redis cluster tutorial: [http://redis.io/topics/cluster- tutorial](http://redis.io/topics/cluster-tutorial)

Redis cluster Specification (work in progress): [http://redis.io/topics/cluster-spec](http://redis.io/topics/cluster-spec)</comment>


Shutdown of the LHC, by Kevin Black - <AUTHOR> http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/230

<comment><USER2> Reminds me of a science-fiction short story that I once read. A team working on a massive particle accelerator built to study some exotic low-energy particle kept having it break down every time they tried to use it. Even if everything was working perfectly, _something_ would fail right before the crucial moment, and stop the experiment dead.

Months of replacing perfectly good parts went by, until they finally figured things out: They had been accidentally destroying the universe, due to the nature of the particles being studied.

<comment><USER3> What story was it?

<comment><USER2> I wish I could remember... I'll let you know if I do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a bit in "The Elegant Universe" about how at this point it's impossible to distinguish between real but weird physics and just crazy.

<comment><USER5> Normally that's a sign that you're heading in the wrong direction...

<comment><USER4> The guy who wrote it (Brian Greene) is a string physicist, so he definitely thinks so.

Every time you hear a physicist interviewed about string theory what you get is: 'It's not very good, but it's all we got'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Proof via rigorous computer simulation:

      >>> from __future__ import LHC

        File "<stdin>", line 1
      SyntaxError: future feature LHC is not defined

</comment><comment><USER7> They haven't actually started high energy collision tests yet, so... the black hole possibility is still there. Here's what might

happen (it's a flash but it shows the real possibility):

<http://www.yaplakal.com/forum8/topic208652.html>

The guys behind LHC say nothing like that will happen and suggest that nature conducts similar experiments in the Earth's

atmosphere every day. However Dr Wagner is pretty sure that nature does not collide two highly focused beams of particles with the

energies seen only when the universe was born. See his web site here:

<http://lhcdefense.org/>

The second argument of CERN is that even if a microscopic black hole appears, it will quickly evaporate due to hawking radiation.

However, hawking radiation is just a theory. Hawking changed his mind about black holes once, and there's not reason to think he'd

get it right this time. There's not reason to bet your life, the life of your children and the future of the planet based on a

word of one quantum physicist.

Even though the odds of the black hole appearing are not that high, did anyone ask you if you're willing to trust a bunch of

scientists with your life just so that they can test their theories?

I sure hope that the next time $6 bln dollars are spent by scientists it will be on finding cure for cancer and not the

hypothetical higgs particle. Last time quantum physicists produced something useful resulted in millions of people dead in

Hirohima, Nagasaki and Chernobyl.

The first high power experiments will be conducted end of 2008 or early 2009, so there's still time to stop this doomsday device.

I hope that anyone who cares about the future will take an action. Please suggest your ideas on how to do this (no violence,

please). Will injunction help? For example:

[http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080123210737AA...](http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080123210737AAn0nZV)

I hope that if enough of us do that, we will be able to save our planet.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's time to play "I don't know crap about physics".

If events in the future can influence the present, wouldn't people in the future try to harness that to influence the past?

It's impossible to read the OP without thinking of the "future Dwight" prank from The Office.

<comment><USER9> I think this is supposed to be the "fixed point seeking" theory of time travel, where the resulting timeline is one where any future impact on past events is such that it results in exactly the same future as the one which caused those changes to the past. Basically, applying a Y combinator to the universe :-).

I had to phrase that really carefully to avoid having to invent new verb tenses.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you talking about this? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel#Immutable_timelines>

<comment><USER9> It's a poorly-written article so I'm not certain, but model 1.2 might be getting at the same thing that I'm describing. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_loop_logic#Time_loop_logic> is a better description.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> According to Carl Sagan, the experiment will not produce much. I don't think they actually expect to produce micro black holes. The most 'interesting' probable result is actually a negative outcome. IE they fail to detect the Higgs boson. That would mean that the 'standard model' needs to be abandoned.

</comment><comment><USER10> That's just looking at the Schrödinger's cat experiment from the point of view of the cat: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_immortality>

</comment><comment><USER11> I suppose you could form a hypothesis and conduct and experiment that, if the hypothesis is correct, would cause something "miraculous" (i.e. statistically impossible) to happen in the present...

<comment><USER12> Like, if I forgot my keys, and then decided that, when I eventually find my keys, I'll go back in time and put them under this rock, and then WHOA my keys are under the rock!! (Now to remember to do that, so the universe doesn't fall apart...)

disclaimer: didn't rtfa, just having fun.

<comment><USER13> Like it... my first thought was "Bill and Ted meet Stephen Hawking."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well, I've only read the introduction of the actual paper, but they do start talking about God :)

</comment><comment><USER15> It is ridiculous to imagine that a species that doesn't even have warp engines yet could destroy the universe.

</comment><comment><USER16> TNG anyone?

<comment><USER17> But no sign of Brannon Braga...</comment></comment>


How to Stop Time - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/opinion/sunday/how-to-stop-time.html <comment><USER2> As I've matured and grown in my technology career, I've found procrastination pays enormous dividends with only small drawbacks.

Procrastination pushes you to wait to do a task until you find the optimal amount of time you know you need left, while doing it in the most relevant environment.

For example, If I code or design something to early it is more likely that research, marketing or product direction could have changed, causing a percentage or all of my work to become moot.

However, If I wait to do my work until I know I have just enough time left, I find my work is the most relevant and least likely to require changes of substance due to shifts of other parties.

I whole heartedly advocate for procrastination due to this. Its a beneficial decision making response that we should stop fighting.

<comment><USER3> I need fewer developers with that attitude, I want people who can get stuff done, but by their nature, put it off. There will always be those that procrastinate in a team and there will, thankfully, always be those that just get it down. The reason why your technique seems to work for you is more likely because are picking up your slack.

I wholeheartedly advocate you getting off my team :)

<comment><USER4> You have no idea of the context from which he is making that statement.

You have no idea of his technical competence or his efficacy with regard to completing tasks and shipping products.

You have very little legitimate basis from which to extrapolate that he/she would _ever_ want to be a member _your_ team in the first place.

Judging by the implicated narrative you seem to be espousing, I'm sure _I_ wouldn't want to be a part of your team.

Even disregarding the fact that you mistakenly omitted the word "others" your haughty comment could not have been better phrased to portray a small-minded project manager with little understanding or empathy for those that _apparently_ work under you.

The assumption that any programmer commenting here is equivalent to a 'member of your team' is little and less based in reality, and much and more based in your own flawed interpretation of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The quality of discussion about procrastination is shockingly low. Try telling people you're reading a book on procrastination, and some joker will say, "Ha! Ironic, right? Get it?" And everyone will chuckle good-naturedly at the thought of someone procrastinating by reading a book on procrastination.

No one stops to examine why we should assume someone reading a book is shirking their duties. Even watching a YouTube video is not inherently an act of procrastination. If anything, our culture has an epidemic of people not being able to relax without being filled with guilt and shame over their momentary lack of productivity.

</comment><comment><USER6> Also a good read on the subject [http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html](http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html)

<comment><USER7> I'm bummed he had no advice for type-a procrastinators like myself

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Simply not doing what one is specifically "tasked to do" does not necessarily represent procrastination. It may be not be a direct route to one's specific end; however, it's important to recognize that sometimes on the journey from side to side, one learns, finds, or imagines a new way to move forward. The internet simply provides new ways (which society moves to chastise and to ascribe blame) to wander off the beaten path. I find that when my internet clicking and surfing become as wayward as a three year old following a butterfly in flight, usually I come away having learned something unexpected or something I didn't know I wanted to know, in both cases, of value. Do I think people spend/waste a lot of time watching random fart contests and people acting the fool? Well sure. But, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. The benefit of online "procrastination" in many cases is significant.

</comment><comment><USER9> Age and the accompanying experience have started to bring me introspection and retrospection, and from these I've realized opportunities I've missed out on because I didn't do something earlier that I could/should have.

</comment><comment><USER10> _A recent infographic in The Economist revealed that in the 140 million hours humanity spent watching "Gangnam Style" on YouTube two billion times, we could have built at least four more (desperately needed) pyramids at Giza._

Perhaps the pyramids got built because the Egyptians were putting off something more important.</comment>


Review my startup: YouIntern.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.youintern.com <comment><USER2> I might have missed it, but I didn't find a decent browse interface. If I'm starting out searching for internships, I don't necessarily know any search terms to jump off from. An idle browsing of all available positions would make things easier from the intern side.

<comment><USER3> Yes, or some type of localised browsing. More likely than not, people would prefer to do the internship in their home city.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I just launched a pet project with a few friends and I'd love to hear any feedback.

It's a website that connects students looking for internships and employers providing them. The focus is advertising/marketing industries, but we're looking to expand into other verticals in the future.

Thanks!

<comment><USER4> The graphics and layout of your site look great :)

I have a suggestion that might be of use: reduce the content on your main page so that the user can tell in 15 seconds or less what your site does, and how to get started.

Some examples:

\- removing "Search Employers, Internships, and Reviews" and the middle search box, while leaving the one on the top

\- Removing "My Portfolio", should be shown only when logged in

\- Moving "Contact Us" to the bottom of the page

\- Removing "recent reviews" and replacing it with "From the Blogs

\- Adding some big buttons for "Students" and "Employers" (your main audience)

Keep up the good work!

<comment><USER5> Agreed, same thing I said yesterday:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=342705>

Too much off-message content right up front. "Freedom from coffee and copies" and "new and improved" are the two messages you hit me with on first impression, which loses me. Your message seems to be, "YouIntern.com brings students and employers together." That's what needs to be in 1000 point font. You should follow up with your main point of differentiation, i.e. "by crawling 8 bazillion thingers and having a team of monkeys sort them to match your skills".

<comment><USER6> Nod. "Freedom from coffee and copies" should be replaced with "Bringing students and employers together".

I'd also change "But you need a great internship, one that moves your career forward" to simply "A great internship that moves your career forward."

<comment><USER5> Thinking about this one further -- I might change it to be more targeted at employers. I think they're the harder group to get on board, and if you get them, and the right ones, then the students will follow.

Maybe something like, "Great minds, at a special, introductory price." ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This looks great! I've been trying to find a good internship lately. I go to Northeastern, and while the internships in our co-op program are usually far above "copies and coffee", they're not always too appealing :)

<comment><USER8> I'm in the same boat, but I have yet to look in the internship database that Georgia Tech offers to it's co-op/internship students.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks good - My comments are more a matter of style, so take with a pinch of salt...

1\. I like the logo, but I don't like it against the blue. It washes out the colors. I'd change the background to something more complimentary - or maybe instead of a drop shadow a white glow would work (not sure without seeing it :)

2\. I don't like the byline "Freedom from Coffee and Copies". You'll turn off the set: "I had the best times fetching coffee" and "I show them the ropes to X, why shouldn't they get me coffee" and "If they can't be bothered getting coffee, they aren't motivated enough to be an intern at supercompany Y"... etc... etc... This is even if they have a great position - people can be stubborn on principle. I'd save it as a byline for the "Interns" section.

3\. I initially didn't like the name, which is never really a big deal, but I liked it when I saw the "you-intern" blue/red logo. You could also emphasize the three colors if you went to "you-in-tern" - which is also a neat play on words.

Again, all just style. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER10> Great idea--just makes a lot of sense. Some thoughts on UI:

1) Would be great to put listings front and center on the homepage. The idea doesn't need a whole lot of explaining (it's a good thing)

2) I wouldn't auto-hide the internship details on a listing. That is the most important info on the entire site, I think.

3) Agree with commenter that most people prob browse rather than search

</comment><comment><USER11> I would suggest sliding div#Search down for options, or maybe just adding a "expand" button (on <http://new.youintern.com/search/filter>) for showing the content of the list-items corresponding to search (employers|internships|reviews)?

After doing a search that suggested that I "try choosing 'include old results'", it was entirely non-obvious to me that I needed to mouseover the checkboxes, and the options under "employers" went past the bottom of my browser window (firefox 3.0.1).

Other than that, this looks like a really awesome service. I'm bookmarking it in case I actually end up going to college in a year or so in the hopes that it grows into what it has potential to grow into.

Good luck, and thanks for launching a project that has immediate practical use to a lot of people.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd change around the search box. The main one in the middle of the page is too low. And the top search box is too boring.

"Search Employers, Internships, and Reviews" to bring people to Advanced Search is too wordy

Remove the whole blogs part of the main page...it takes up way too much time and you gain absolutely nothing from it.

I'd also add a browse functionality which at least lets people look at all the jobs in a particular field. i.e. Finance, Medicine etc.

Your actual internship description needs to be full from the start. You take up 90% of the space just to tell them the company name, and then for actual description you ask them to click "Show full info"

</comment><comment><USER13> Overall the site looks good. I would like to see the average ratings for each company. When I check out Raytheon I have to read each individual review to find the ratings.It would also be nice to limit the searches to fields, like engineering, on the initial search.

</comment><comment><USER14> I really would like to search by location that isn't apparent from the main page.

<comment><USER15> Yes! I'm going to school in Troy, NY, which the geolocation figured out, but I'm looking for internships in Silicon Valley (where I spend my summers). I can't search by location, and I can't figure out how to browse past the first 10. Makes finding internships kind of hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks neat. That's the same thing i was going to do with www.jobzor.com with its redesign (<http://sicret.net/jobzor>).

One bit of advice: make a Facebook app.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm looking for an internship too, so I signed up! I'm a Grad Student at San Jose State, so hopefully I shouldnt have too much trouble finding programming internships..

</comment><comment><USER18> What'd you use to geotarget the "internships near you" box?

<comment><USER9> I think it's mocked up - It's showing the diametrically opposite side to the world for me at the moment :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Your entering a crowded market (there are a million sites with this purpose), but your site is about 100x nicer than the others I've seen.

</comment><comment><USER20> superficially speaking the logo is great but can i suggest you consider the layout of the page. thing is the search seems oddly re-contextualized down there like it's an example of a search rather than the real deal. at first blush i thought it was a gif of the search you "could perform".

</comment><comment><USER21> Cool.

Your logo looks very similar to the MS Office logo.

</comment><comment><USER22> ahem... <http://randaclay.com/bahamas.png>

<comment><USER9> That whole motif was pretty common in the 70's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is there anything that sets you aside from the hundreds of other intern sites out there?

</comment><comment><USER24> Looks pretty good, it will get even better as you get more internship opportunities up

</comment><comment><USER25> It'd be nice if the internships on the frontpage related to the user's location.

</comment><comment><USER26> The search box at the top returns an error page for every query.

</comment><comment><USER27> Your design looks very olympicy.</comment>


Elon Musk: Acronyms Seriously Suck - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/klaaspieter/12cd68f54bb71a3940eae5cdd4ea1764 <comment><USER2> Musk has a point. Just whipping up your own acronyms and terminology in highly technical field will get out of hand easily and screw up the communication.

Many big tech companies, newspapers etc. have their own terminology databases and language planning efforts to keep communication internally and externally coherent.</comment>


Distributed systems readings - <AUTHOR> http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/15-749/READINGS/required/ <comment><USER2> Some more great resources:

This is a list of many of the most influential white papers: [http://christophermeiklejohn.com/distributed/systems/2013/07...](http://christophermeiklejohn.com/distributed/systems/2013/07/12/readings- in-distributed-systems.html) This is an associated podcast: [http://thinkdistributed.io/](http://thinkdistributed.io/) This is mixu's book on distributed systems: [http://book.mixu.net/distsys/single- page.html](http://book.mixu.net/distsys/single-page.html) This is the MIT reading list: [http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.852/05/papers/](http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.852/05/papers/)

<comment><USER3> mixu's book turned out to be a gem. He does a wonderful job of what he claims in the introduction:

 _I 've tried to provide a more accessible introduction to distributed systems. To me, that means two things: introducing the key concepts that you will need in order to have a good time reading more serious texts, and providing a narrative that covers things in enough detail that you get a gist of what's going on without getting stuck on details._

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a small collection of related university courses that might be of interest - [https://github.com/prakhar1989/awesome- courses/blob/master/R...](https://github.com/prakhar1989/awesome- courses/blob/master/README.md#systems)

</comment><comment><USER5> This might be very useful: [http://henryr.github.io/distributed-systems- readings/](http://henryr.github.io/distributed-systems-readings/)

</comment><comment><USER6> As a supplement to these I would also recommend checking out the lecture notes for 15-440, the intro distributed systems class. I took it spring of 2013 and thought it gave me a really good grounding in the material.

[http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/15-440-f14/index/lecture_in...](http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/15-440-f14/index/lecture_index.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, thats one course I wanted to take but could not. Would be great if cmu could give access to class video lectures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For a more ambitious reading list, refer to CS6410 from Cornell [0]. The topics of the readings range from operating systems to distributed systems and networking.

[0] [http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6410/2014fa/sched.htm](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6410/2014fa/sched.htm)

</comment><comment><USER8> Another good list of papers from my alma mater

[http://www.cs.rice.edu/~alc/comp520/schedule.html](http://www.cs.rice.edu/~alc/comp520/schedule.html)

This class on networking has a great list of papers as well..great for understanding the systems which distributed systems depend on as well:

[https://www.clear.rice.edu/comp529/www/list.html](https://www.clear.rice.edu/comp529/www/list.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> The main webpage (and the links from that) will give more context on how the readings were chosen - [https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/15-749/](https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/15-749/).

On a separate note, it is always great to see Satya's courses in the news.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. He's probably one of the best teachers, can explain difficult concepts in very simple terms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for sharing. I summarize my stuff here: [http://www.freedomlayer.org/articles_index.html](http://www.freedomlayer.org/articles_index.html) I'm not done yet, but it might be of interest.

</comment><comment><USER11> I came up with a similar list, in reverse chronological order: [https://timelinee.com/t/SlqJWH/](https://timelinee.com/t/SlqJWH/)

<comment><USER11> most papers in the above list are from the reading list to prepare my phd qual exam in university of Wisconsin: [http://research.cs.wisc.edu/areas/os/Qual/](http://research.cs.wisc.edu/areas/os/Qual/) (it used to have 50 papers on the list; now, it's 40.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there a more user friendly and hand holding way to learn about distributed systems?

Such as a good video lecture series?

</comment><comment><USER13> Hey! We're working on some cool distributed systems stuff, data in particular - and dedicated to javascripters! If you're interested, check out [http://github.com/amark/gun](http://github.com/amark/gun) or send me a message!</comment>


If you see the cops, start recording - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/5/21281264/protests-police-violence-record-phone-video-right-legal <comment><USER2> > _But before action was taken by city leaders, Buffalo police lied about the > incident. In an initial statement, the department said that a person was > arrested "during a skirmish with other protesters," and that "during that > skirmish involving protesters, one person was injured when he tripped and > fell." The video clearly refutes the statement, showing that there was no > skirmish around the elderly man, and that the officers pushed him to the > ground for no justifiable reason._

The Buffalo incident offers a vivid example of why police records should be considered unreliable. Where are the "good cops" among the 20 or so in the video who had the opportunity to speak up, but in practice chose to maintain the blue wall of silence?

<comment><USER3> There is parallel with pilots and airplane crashes. There is a tendency for airlines to put the blame on a pilot in case of a crash, this disincentives pilots from speaking the truth. Unfortunately the 'anti cop' sentiment would have the same effect.

Imgaine how hard it is for us to admit a mistake at work which brings the website down but here someone's life is at stake.

What happens if a cop makes a mistake and causes grave injury to someone. What would be his incentive to admit mistake and possibly spend rest of his life in prison.

<comment><USER4> I'm a pilot. This isn't remotely a fair comparison. There are lots of very complex and nuanced situations in aviation that require judgment calls. People are going to get it wrong sometimes. We're human.

That's a far cry from this situation. There is no "judgment call" here: don't violently shove elderly people to the ground for no reason. If you accidentally do, help them up. If you pass by an elderly person lying on the ground and bleeding, check on them.

There's no "mistake" here.

<comment><USER3> > There's no "mistake" here.

I wasn't talking about this specific case though, not sure how you inferred that from my comment that shoving old man was a mistake .

I was talking about a hypothetical case where it was indeed a mistake.

<comment><USER5> Great, well in this case, this cop acted violently and aggressively towards a senior citizen, who was killed through that cop's action. Not murder, but definitely manslaughter. If you did that to someone, that's what you would be going to jail for, and rightly so.

<comment><USER6> Not at all excusing what happened, but was he actually killed? I thought he was taken to a hospital and recovered?

<comment><USER5> I apologise, I initially read that he had been killed, later followed up on the article and they had posted a correction that he "easily could have been killed". You are correct!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cops may ask you not to record and even threaten you with arrest for recording. Do not be intimidated; it is your right to record without obstructing.

If you find yourself in a situation where you might be detained and thereby unable to control interactions with your device, on iPhone you can disable TouchID and FaceID by holding one of the volume buttons and the sleep/wake button simultaneously for a few seconds. This will require you to enter your passcode the next time you want to unlock iPhone. Anyone have similar instructions for Android?

<comment><USER8> If told to stop recording, I'd be tempted to reply, "Sir, I am recording for your protection."

Note well: I have not actually tried this. IANAL, and this is not legal advice. Your mileage may vary.

<comment><USER9> Why? What do you hope to achieve other than to possibly inflame the situation? I can't possibly believe that you think the cop is going to think "gee, that's a good point citizen, please carry on".

<comment><USER8> It forces the cop to either _admit_ that he's a bad guy (or at least crossing the line), or else to _not_ cross the line. It makes it so he can't try to pretend to me that he's squeaky clean while actually doing dirty stuff.

<comment><USER10> I don't think you're modeling the cop very well. They're not going to be in a state to reason or debate with you, and the statement "for your protection" if not paid close attention to sounds vaguely like a threat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think half of the police force should be 'armed' with nothing more than cameras.

Arrests are not necessary in the vast majority of situations police are called for, and recording technology is far superior to verbal testimony for serving our courts

<comment><USER12> Cops carry guns because the situation can always get out of hand. Violent criminals still exist in society.

EDIT: the ignorant people claiming average police officer does not deal with violent criminals have obviously never worked as a first responder. They deal with rape, suicide, murder, assault, domestic abuse, robbery, every week unless they're some small town cop in a gilded neighborhood.

The cops in St. Louis, Chicago, Baltimore, NYC, etc, see it every single day.

I hear a lot of suggestions by people have have never done the job. People making spurious claims about what police do and don't deal with on a daily basis.

I would never support female cops without firearms, for example. A grown man can easily overpower any woman, period. Especially when they are tweaked out on drugs.

Cops carry a gun because they have less than 6 seconds to respond to deadly situations that can save lives.

<comment><USER13> Plenty of departments in other countries do not carry guns and do their jobs just fine.

<comment><USER14> Don't bring a knife to a gun fight. The US is saturated with firearms so it would be foolish for the police not to carry. In the UK the situation used to be different and to a certain extent still is, the police used to be unarmed (are they still?). It should be noted however that the number of knife crimes there is high - people tend to use the weapons at hand. This has led to a call for a ban on pointy kitchen knives, as if that would change much (if anything).

<comment><USER15> This is an argument activists have made for years in favor of gun control. The prevalence of guns in US society has made us objectively far less safe.

<comment><USER14> There are two things to this:

Compare the rate of gun-related crime in a country like Switzerland (where guns are readily available and many people have been trained to use them) with that in Germany (where guns are as rare as hens teeth among the non-criminal contingent of the population) and you'll notice that Switzerland does not suffer unduly under a wave of gun crime. Why not? What is it in Swiss society which makes it possible for people to have access to firearms, the training to use them yet the wherewithal to know when _not_ to use them? Germany and Switzerland are neighbours, they mostly speak the same language, they're both affluent countries. What would Germany look like were firearms as widely spread as they are in Switzerland? Now compare the Swiss data to those in the USA and a clear difference shows. What is the difference between Swiss and American society which can explain this difference? Is it affluence? Switzerland is a rich country but so is the USA. Is it the fact that the difference between rich and less affluent is bigger in the USA than it is in Switzerland? Is it the amount of cultural diversity? The USA is a diverse country, Switzerland is largely homogeneous. Is is the overarching culture? Is it the difference in trust level? Switzerland is a high-trust country, the USA is not.

The other part on the gun control question is the age-old adage that in countries where guns are outlawed only outlaws have guns. They're not exactly hard to come by after all. It seems to work in a country like Japan but it probably takes Japanese culture as well as the physical lack of firearms on the island nation to pull this off.

<comment><USER16> Isn't most crime caused by poverty? I would suspect that a country that both has a functioning government and a reliable social safety net wouldn't have as much crime as one that doesn't.

<comment><USER14> Take a look at Sweden for an example of a country where poverty is more or less absent due to a wide social safety net while crime is on the rise. It is not poverty which causes gangs to go out and rob teenagers of their expensive branded jackets, iPhones and sneakers. Some turn to crime to get luxury items, some do it to dominate others (Denmark has created a specific category of 'dominance crime' for this phenomenon), some do it to gain street cred etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Semi off topic, but one thing that really bugs me about the dialogue around police is when people (especially authority figures) call non-police "civilians". I get that you need a word for it, but "civilians" is a particularly poor choice.

The police ARE civilians. They are not military, nor are they subject to military justice or discipline, and their training and function in society is (whether they like it or not) entirely different. They are members of the community, not an occupying army.

This might seem like pedantry but it's not: using the word civilian for non- police takes the militarization of the police as an unquestioned assumption.

<comment><USER18> Strongly agree. This is just one example of how police culture is toxic and likely un-fixable without dramatic changes to the entire concept of policing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I haven't had a run in with the police in a long time. Based on a lot of the video footage I have been seeing revolving around these riots I would say the problem of police brutality is exceptionally larger than I was giving it credit for being not just a few weeks ago. I hold out hope that the majority of officers aren't like those I have seen in the media (left and right) committing acts of unprovoked, and unnecessary violence, but I am starting to loose some confidence in my conviction.

I have to be honest, I am not sure what the solution is here. On the whole, I think they need better training, but what that would look like.. I am afraid to say that topic is over my head.

</comment><comment><USER20> I disagree with record; you should STREAM. Get it off the device so it can't be conveniently destroyed and deleted.

<comment><USER21> Any suggestions for such a setup?

<comment><USER22> ACLU has an app specifically for that, which uploads videos to them automatically.

<comment><USER23> [https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming- po...](https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-police/aclu- apps-record-police-conduct)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A helpful resource for apps for recording: [https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming- po...](https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-police/aclu- apps-record-police-conduct)

</comment><comment><USER25> Anyone have any good suggestions for android recorders? Preferably something which will start uploading somewhere (dropbox? A server of my choice via ssh?) ASAP

<comment><USER26> If you install the Dropbox app there's a setting that let's you autosync your DCIM folder with the cloud, beware the data cost if doing so outside of wifi. Also, you may not want this setting on 24/7 or one day you'll be shocked to see what Dropbox saved on your behalf.

<comment><USER27> SyncThing is a great alternative that syncs between your phone and any computer you install it on (instead of some company's servers).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I haven't had a run-in with the police since I was in my twenties, but I think just for fun - I'm going to get a bodycam, a dashcam and a bunch of security cameras for my property.

You never know when they might come in handy.

Anyone have any general advice for building them yourself with a Pi or Arduino?

<comment><USER29> Don't build a dashcam yourself. Building batteries that don't fail in the heat of a car parked in the sun is a hard problem, as is the automatic saving when a crash occurs. Buy a dashcam with a proven reliable battery or capacitor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I almost always wear a shirt with a pocket so I can record without it being obvious.

<comment><USER31> My layperson understanding is that there might be legal implications of the "without it being obvious" part. For example, I don't know whether that could be a problem in Massachusetts:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_call_recording_laws#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_call_recording_laws#Two- party_consent_states)

<comment><USER32> That's for audio, not video. If you don't record the audio it wouldn't apply. If you do you shouldn't hide it to be safe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> "Why are you worried about surveillance if you have nothing to hide?"

<comment><USER34> You are probably being downvoted because of the oft-repeated argument in favor of surveillance of citizens by some form of authority.

However it's interesting how flipping that argument around would cause all sorts of discomfort by the very people who advocated it in the other direction. (Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe that was in fact the point you were making.)

<comment><USER33> That was exactly my point. This is what people should tell the police in this situation. It didn't get across.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> -Don't Talk to the Police-

Regent Law Professor James Duane gives us startling reasons why we should always exercise our 5th Amendment rights when questioned by government officials.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE)

[http://www.olddominionbarassociation.com/Resources/Documents...](http://www.olddominionbarassociation.com/Resources/Documents/How%20to%20Invoke%20the%20Fifth%20Amendment.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER36> Does anyone know how a post with 200 comments and 230 upvotes published just 2 hours ago ends up on the 4th page?

<comment><USER6> Flags.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The NY ACLU app "stop and frisk" is now absent from the Play store. Any ideas?

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.nyclu.stop...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.nyclu.stop.and.frisk.watch)</comment>


An Interview with Brian Kernighan on C and The C Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1960359

<comment><USER2> I started learning programming with K & R in January. Working through the exercises was an amazing foundation in the thought processes programming requires.

The language is simple enough that you're left with nothing to get in the way of the problem in front of you, and you're forced to think of what is happening on a very low level.

That low level understanding helped when I tried languages with more abstractions.

</comment><comment><USER3> Over and above the interview, I'm very happy to see that K&R's _C Programming Language_ will soon be released in ebook formats.

<comment><USER4> Sadly it won't get updated to new ways of doing C coding.

<comment><USER5> I've seen this mentioned several times. Is there a resource you recommend on the 'new ways'? Asking out of curiosity, about to start a side project with C, and I do have the text mentioned.

<comment><USER6> Hmm, here are some things that I do routinely that don't really show up:

ꙮ I always use enum instead of #define for numeric constants.

ꙮ I nearly always use inline instead of #define for small functions whose efficiency worries me.

ꙮ As a result of those two things, I don't use #define much.

ꙮ Everything global is static unless it's in the public API provided by the file.

ꙮ I use dynamic allocation a lot more than the C in the K&R book.

ꙮ I avoid integer function arguments and return values as much as possible, because they're basically untyped, and I benefit from the limited static type checking done by C compilers. I still use them for cases where I'm actually counting or measuring something, and unfortunately for bitfields. When I'm counting bytes, the correct type is usually size_t or ptrdiff_t, which benefits humans and LP64 platforms, but doesn't get you much static type checking benefit.

ꙮ As a result of those two things, I use arrays relatively sparingly.

ꙮ I basically never use function-static variables because they make thread- safety very difficult if not impossible.

ꙮ Use const wherever applicable. It catches some errors, and it's not nearly as draconian as in C++, so it doesn't cause as many problems.

ꙮ After some experience with C++, I usually "typedef struct foo foo", since it costs me two words in the declaration and saves me the "struct" every time I use "foo" later.

I don't know if these are the kinds of things people mean when they talk about new ways of coding in C, or where to find them documented.

<comment><USER7> I like that idea of using a (presumably unnamed) _enum_ as a bag of constants that aren't necessarily related. From the small amount of Go I tried, its syntax for constants seemed a more evolved version of that.

What do you think is the minimum realistic preprocessor usage that can be got away with? _#include_ \+ _#pragma once_?

<comment><USER8> I'd say that it's bad to put #pragma once in your minimal set, since it's nonstandard. Why not use plain old include guards?

For me, container_of() is also indispensable. Although maybe it's on the level of 'errno' as being "not really a dirty macro".

<comment><USER7> I know - I was just spitballing the minimum number, since guards require conditionals too. Though, portability aside, you have to agree that it's simply nicer, since it plainly states the intent without requiring a little dance each time.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How an accountant created an entire RPG inside an Excel spreadsheet - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/04/how-an-accountant-created-an-entire-rpg-inside-an-excel-spreadsheet/

<comment><USER2> This post under another title:

 _How a web programmer created a whole spreadsheet inside a web browser_</comment>


Giant Ribbon Discovered at the Edge of the Solar System - <AUTHOR> http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/15oct_ibex.htm?list1079677 <comment><USER2> So imagine we get to build a probe for the sole purpose of flinging it out there between V1 and V2 at the highest velocity we can muster. What sort of instruments should it have?

<comment><USER3> I'm not an astrophysicist, but I imagine a mass spectrometer to measure its make up and magnetometer to measure the magnetic field would be at the top of the list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Key Star Trek Generations analogies.

But of course ... I've never seen that movie, and if I did I didn't like it.</comment>


Runners using social media to cheat in marathons - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-weird-world-of-social-media-marathon-cheating/ <comment><USER2> I feel like Marathon Cheating would make a great segment on LastWeekTonight's "How Is This Still A Thing?"

I was flabbergasted to read about "Patty" who got caught cheating at a Disneyland 5K. Have to agree with the sentiment that:

> "It was just odd," Murphy says. "I understand the motivation of people who > are trying to qualify to run Boston, or be part of it. You can see the > benefit even if you don't agree with it." But when it comes to less > prestigious races like cartoon character-themed 5Ks, "this is the stuff > that's beyond me."</comment>


JC Penney ousts CEO Ron Johnson - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/jc-penney-ousts-ceo-ron-020924276.html

<comment><USER2> After spending 2 years of my life in a retail turnaround backed by an activist investor (Eddie Lampert at SHLD), I can't say i'm that surprised.

This game of retail is much harder than it looks from afar. Certainly much harder than working at places like Google or Apple - mainly because the market forces are against you. You're working with low margins, high capex, deteriorating infrastructure, deflated brands, legacy technology and a legacy customer base. To top it off, the shear momentum of companies this large (at SHLD we had 300,000 employees) is alone hard to grapple with even if you didn't have market forces against you. It's a daunting task.

If non-linear equity growth was easy, everyone would be doing it. Turnarounds are not for the weak of heart. Turnarounds in that sense, are actually similar to startups.

<comment><USER3> For others who are curious: SHLD: Sears Holding Company.

Turnarounds are like startups, but with legacy: customers, employees, vendors, systems. Much harder in many ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Earlier submitted article + discussion here --> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5514971>

</comment><comment><USER5> This article has some background:

[http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/03/jcpe...](http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/03/jcpenney_ron_johnson_came_from_apple_to_reinvent_j_c_penney_and_ended_up.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> From a strictly consumer point of view, I loved what he did. I loved the one low price concept, with an occasional sale. I hated "do you have the coupons? walk over to the door and. . ." or "you would have saved an extra 15% if you had been here at 0-dark-thirty". I know I'm in the minority among shoppers and retail would did if everyone were like me, but just give me a price I like and I'll either buy it or not.

<comment><USER7> "I know I'm in the minority among shoppers"

Vast minority among people who count shopping as a hobby, yet vast majority of the population. This is like the TV narrowcasting phenomena where a "success" is 2% of the population being rabid hyper fans and 98% of the population not even willing to watch for free, or to a lesser extent FPS video games. Hyperoptimization to a small group guarantees lack of large group/total population success.

Locally a regional competitor Kohls and national player JCP fight pretty hard for literally generations over who wins the "my hobby is shopping for womens clothes" crowd. The other 95% of the population, like us, go to Target, walmart, pretty much any place else. Dropping the hobby shoppers means they lose whatever fraction of the 5% they used to have, plus the 95% have been marketed for generations not to shop there. I certainly have not set foot in a JCP over the past 14 months. Given a couple years I might have been convinced to try it, but...

You can't turn around a business model that has been marketed for over a generation. If Pepsi decided to skip all this HFCS cola stuff and ship canned apple cider, its going to take a lot longer than 14 months or whatever this guy had. The startup lesson is its much easier to pivot into something entirely new, like a desktop/laptop computer company going into portable music players and then pivoting again into phones, or a search engine giant going into webmail and then into phones.

For some tech examples of rough pivots that are just too close to home to succeed, think of ebay trying to turn themselves into a poor copy of amazon by driving away all the small/individual sellers, or craigslist trying to turn themselves into a poor copy of ebay instead of being the wild west of classified ads.

Closer to home "hacker news" could probably pivot into a daily tech video newscast feed, but it would be hopeless to try to pivot into a poor clone of digg/reddit. (LOL have some "hacker news gold" for your post, or maybe we'd use BTC LOL)

Could Walmart pivot into an upscale bespoke merchant of $2500 mens suits? Not a chance, too close. Could they pivot into being car dealers or check cashing bankers? Sure! In fact that's probably a good idea.

<comment><USER5> You're so right. In fact, Walmart actually already does cash checks.

<http://www.walmart.com/cp/Check-Cashing/632047>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Selling clothing at a retail store isn't the same thing as selling Apple devices at an Apple store? Huh. I thought profession was more important than understanding an industry.</comment>


Apple Getting Blowout iPad 2 Online Sales? 2-3 Week Shipping Delay Already - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/ipad-2-online-sales-2011-3

<comment><USER2> I went online this morning at 8AM EST to look at the iPad 2 shipping time. It was 3-5 days, and I said "enh." Then I went back an hour later and it was up to 2-3 weeks. Depressing.

I wonder if Apple isn't a little miffed at the un-extraordinary pace of Verizon iPhone 4 sales and decided to do this to get people in line and on TV? Lame.

I was ready to pre-order a white iPad 2 on Apple.com five minutes after the keynote, but at the prospect of waiting a month or fighting people in stores for a chance to get a model and color I don't want, I not give them my money for a while.</comment>