jlev

Even better, they ask for your last name and the last six digits of your SSN to even check your potential impact. The problem is that the first three digits of your SSN are derived from your state of birth, so the last six give up basically the entire thing. http://www.ssofficelocation.com/social-security-number-prefi...

This whole system is so fucked.

In both cases the California standard was higher, improving the environment and saving lives.

What happened to the states being policy laboratories? I thought Republicans were for local control? Or is that only for school textbooks and baking wedding cakes.

There's a need in the non-profit space for something that does this well and is relatively cheap per-message. Big players like MobileCommons and RevolutionMessaging charge 1k+ per month for SMS blast capabilities based on list size. If you have an API or the ability to import/export CSVs you could probably compete at the low end of the market.

Or make it open source?

Is this a joke? They are pouring money into building a monopoly, so they can raise prices when they eventually control urban and suburban transportation.

Great to see more chatbots that encourage real world civic action, not just make it easier to order pizza.

I did similar work with Hello.Vote for voter registration, and there are so many offline forms that could be improved with a bit of web/messaging UI. Also see snapfresh.org for a CfA project that helps find places that accept EBT cards.

Have you thought about doing more targeted swing state matches?

I did a vote swap in 2004 using a similar system. I voted for the Badnarik (L) in MA, and someone in MO voted for Kerry (D). We did talk on the phone beforehand, to get a sense of each other's politics, and I did what I promised. No guarantees that he did, and Kerry ended up losing MO pretty hard anyways.

Hey Joe, the registration process is actually totally distinct from voting, which is all done in-person. Poll watchers are still very necessary to ensure the integrity of everyone's ballot.

I've worked on voter registration tech for the last four years, in the US and in new democracies like Libya. I think SMS is the best way to reach people who don't necessarily have a home computer and printer or a smartphone.

A chatbot I built with FightfortheFuture.org that makes it really easy to register to vote. Takes only 10 text messages to gather information, and then we submit to the state or send you a PDF.

Directly submits to states in CA, MA, VA, IL, GA, CO, AZ. Working on further integrations in PA (where there's an API), and other states with online systems that don't have CAPTCHAs. We'd love to work with other voter registration innovators like Vote.org, VotePlz, NovemberApp, TurboVote and Rock the Vote to improve online voter registration for everyone.

Will be open source after the election. Code is Node.js, Python and Jekyll.

I bought an mBot kit to make with my 6 year old cousin recently. It was fun, but the default software was pretty limited, and the scratch programming environment was not actually that easy to use for a beginner. Had to drop into C for any sort of multi-tasking, and the documentation was mostly in Chinese.

Marty looks great, backed. Looking forward to playing robots in 2017!

Read the Nine Billion Names of God, by Arthur C Clarke, for a reason why they might have been counting. http://www.sffaudio.com/podcasts/TheNineBillionNamesOfGodByA...

Cosmo Wenman also does this for museums, with their permission, and releases the data under open licenses

https://cosmowenman.wordpress.com/category/3d-scanning/ http://www.thingiverse.com/CosmoWenman/designs/

The Public Laboratory has been doing this kind of work with low-cost DIY and open source tools for several years. Kite mapping, aerial photography, laser spectrometry, and open data collaboration. Check it out at https://publiclab.org

But both were late compared to the first newspaper on the net. The MIT Tech first published on the web in 1993, and on telnet before that. And they have digital archives going back to 1882. http://tech.mit.edu/browse.html

$42 million and they couldn't design a quieter engine?

It's almost as if we need a "Congressional Versioning System" rimshot.

At least we're finally getting open bill status data as XML, without having to rely on GovTrack scraping the Federal Register.

Beautiful font! I can't read the language, but have done some software work in the middle east, and Harir looks much cleaner to my eye than the helvetica knock-offs in arabic.

If you want a real challenge in il8n, try ensuring that all the ligatures are correct in generated PDFs.

Why is 1Password over Dropbox the "worst of both worlds"? Seems like it's potentially safer, because it's encrypted with your passphrase and also your dropbox credentials. Sure, the NSA can probably get it, but J Random Hacker can't.

This essay by Langdon Winner is pretty much required reading for technologists who are interested in real-world uses of our tools and their impact in society. The idea that technology is apolitical is a common misconception, or self-delusion, of too many engineers. Our ideas are influenced by the systems we grew up in, learned our trade in, and benefit from.

For a current example, contrast the products created to solve the problems of 25 year olds with too much money (https://medium.com/matter/the-shut-in-economy-ec3ec1294816), and those for people who have experienced the horrible scale of mass incarceration (http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/24/pigeon-ly/). Both tap potentially huge markets, but posit very different worlds.

Getting outside of your own experiential bubble can make you a stronger product designer and user advocate, and potentially a more successful startup founder.

These guys should start their own credit card transaction aggregator (ala Mint), and gather user data that is expressly made available for market research. Make the analysis for privacy tradeoff more explicit and distribute profits.

Pretty slick interface; hope it catches on.

Dissent, paid for by DARPA.

Excellent reporting by @headhntr and @coracurrier. The Hacking Team malware can be installed in every major OS, via numerous entry points (wifi, flash injection, physical installation), and can be signed with trusted root certificates.

What defenses do we have to ensure our systems are secure and clean?

Love the PublicLab's enthusiastic embrace of open source hardware and software licenses. If you don't want to 3d-print your own, you can get an awesome bluray laser spectrometer + webcam at their Kickstarter. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/publiclab/the-homebrew-...

Participatory citizen-science FTW!

Damn, dumplin.gs got snatched...

There is already a TechCash system for making purchases with an MIT student ID. All the on-campus food vendors accept it, as well as the student bar. No need for crypto-currency, there's already a functioning local system.

Folks have been doing this for years, and for cheaper, with balloons and kites. Check out the awesome work at publiclab.org, where they've mapped the gulf oil spill in 2010, pollution at the Gowanus canal, Occupy encampments. Stitch the photos with the OSS Ruby tools at mapknitter.org, publish them with a public domain license, and they'll actually be added to the google base map!

Buy a kit for < $100: http://store.publiclab.org/products/balloon-mapping-kit

If you still have data in Dopplr that you want out, now's a good time to migrate it to TripIt. Here's a simple script I wrote to do it. https://github.com/jlev/Dopplr2TripIt

He wasn't a student, but he was definitely part of the MIT community. He was in a student group, a technical member of the W3C (housed on campus), and his father was an alum and a contractor at the Media Lab. Joi Ito, the head of the lab, sent President Reif a letter asking if this could be dealt with as a "family matter". Reif (or his lawyers) refused.

MIT may not be culpable in his suicide, but they sure don't come out of this looking good. They maintained strict neutrality, when they could have stood up for open access.

Their behavior makes me ashamed to be an alum of my school.

Glad to see the HN community getting excited about this issue. In my professional capacity as the resident technologist at an activist-y non-profit, I have a few things to note:

1) Single issue organizations are quick to grow but hard to sustain. Once the first fight is over, how do you take your list and pivot to a new issue? People lose interest quickly unless there's a hook to keep them involved.

2) Petitions may seem silly, and many of them are, but some have actually had big successes. These are due more to the strategy behind them than the actual numbers; you have to find the right leverage point in the political process to make the numbers matter. They are also useful as signals to organizers that people are interested in an issue, even if they won't be successfully delivered.

3) Gamification in this space is hard. You're one step away from the "slacktivism" critique, and sliding ever closer with each point or badge you give out. For some examples of this being done well, see http://repurpose.workersvoice.org/

For the "3 actions you must take", the handwritten letter is probably the most impactful. Staffers tend to weight online signatures, phone calls, letters, and in person visits by increasing orders of magnitude of importance. Getting 100,000 signatures is now "worth" less than 1,000 letters, particularly as petition numbers continually increase.