sethbannon

Not technically difficult but incredibly tedious. First, you have to go out and collect it from all 50 Secretaries of State, and in come cases county officials. Some states send you the data on a CD (no joke). You then have to clean the data, which is often not in great shape, and then normalize it.

Even then, you only have a snapshot, because the states typically don't keep historical data. What this means is that your dataset won't be as good as someone who's been collecting this data for years, and thereby knows things you won't like where someone used to live, how often they voted there, who recently dropped off the registered voter rolls, etc.

In this case, even this data wouldn't be enough, because the Sanders team had made likely hundreds of thousands of contacts with voters, and recorded what issues they cared about and who they planned to vote for. This data, which they personally collected, is now inaccessible to them.

edit: expounded

For those that are not familiar with the space, campaigns typically use voter contact software to record the results of the conversations they have with potential voters on the phones, at the doors, and over the Internet. In this case, the voter contact software that both the Hillary and Sanders campaigns were using, NGP VAN, had a bug which allowed both campaigns to access each other's private, proprietary data (in this case, I believe, modeling data).

The Data Director on the Sanders campaign discovered the error and (he claims) was verifying and documenting the bug, which was then reported to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and NGP VAN. The DNC claims these actions were not in good faith, and as a reaction cut the Sanders campaign off from the system.

This is a BIG deal for a campaign, so close to the first elections. Campaigns rely on that data to inform nearly everything they do, and rely on access to such tools to conduct their voter outreach program. Being cut off from the system is crippling for a campaign, likely why the Sanders campaign so quickly sued to get its access reinstated [1].

[1] - http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/sanders-campaign-threa...

edit: typos

How does nuclear research have the capability of solving all the world's problems?

How does nitrogen research have the capability of solving all the world's problems?

I can't think of another field of research that's simultaneously brought the potential to solve all the world's problems and the potential to end life as we know it. Very appreciative to see so many great minds working on ensuring AI heralds in more of the former, and none of the latter.

Paul Graham wighted in on this, saying that in his experience by far the most important trait in successful founders is determination. http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html

tl;dr: a hit piece in which the author uses the launch of The Macro to criticize (and not insightfully) YC on completely unrelated topics.

If you want to do something about this, the f.lux team has asked supporters on facebook to sign this petition: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/allow-flux-on-ios

From the article "All couples will now be allowed to have two children".

So it seems China isn't so much ending its one-child policy, as augmenting it by one to a two-child policy. This means the brutal and cruel enforcement will continue, only it will kick in at the third child instead of at the second.

Very neat. Would love to see the American equivalents. Anyone have a link?

Hey Micael, exciting to see YC continuing to battle the inequality that exists in the startup world.

I'm curious -- why did you chose to craft the program along racial lines, as opposed to along socioeconomic lines, which seems to be the recent trend in higher ed affirmative action?

It's a noble initiative but I can't help but wonder if some other discipline will be the need-to-know one in a decade's time.

Very similar to the strategy of community organizing used in politics and social movement building.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the study, but it seems like they took half the group that preferred music and combined them with half the group that preferred silence and put that group in either a silent of musical room.

It would be interesting to look at the breakdown of performance for each group, in each room. It's possible that those who had a preference for music in the silent room had a -20% hit in performance while those who had a preference for silence in silent room had a +20% boost in performance.

What I'd like to know is if someone with a preference for music performs better/worse/equivalent in a room with/without music.

"You'll receive step-by-step details about the work in progess through email."

Does this mean that every time someone orders a pair of shoes they'll be custom made? You'll keep no stock?

I really like the idea of bringing more transparency into the manufacturing process, so kudos on that. Hopefully you'll soon offer a vegan option too :-)

From the SEC form making this official, here are the separate companies under Alphabet Inc:

Google, Calico, Nest, Fiber, Ventures, Capital, X.

Looks like Search / ads, YouTube, Maps, Apps, and Android will stay under Google Inc.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/0001288776150...

It's true that Moore's law doesn't apply everywhere. In fact, some costs (like the costs of sequencing a human genome) are falling much faster than Moore's law would predict: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/DNA_Sequ...

It's been the case in nearly every industry that the "small and nimble upstart" rarely wins. Until they do. Biotech the seems ripe for the same sort of nimble innovation we've seen in software and hardware over the last couple decades. Wrote a bit about this here: http://www.sethbannon.com/biotech-in-the-garage

"We're no longer controlling every pixel. It's more like jazz improvisation." Matias Duarte, VP Design @ Google.

Super interesting concept. The abstraction of design.

There is clearly a problem with the rapid rise in inequality and the tensions gentrification create within a community like The Mission District, but what's the solution? Have there been successful efforts elsewhere that have helped moderate the negative effects of such rapid changes?

"As a part of a settlement agreement with the major record companies, we have agreed to cease operations immediately, wipe clean all of the record companies' copyrighted works and hand over ownership of this website, our mobile apps and intellectual property, including our patents and copyrights."

Ouch. Sounds harsh. Wonder if they had to turn over the user data as well...

I'm not so sure it's wise to call G+ a "dead" social network. According to recent research by Pew, it's more popular than Twitter and just as popular as LinkedIn.

http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/section-2-social-media-...

Incoming Uber notification to everyone dropped off at Snapchat HQ...

Also happy to help here (S12). seth at amicushq

The above linked article is a sensationalist hit piece that's riddled with factual inaccuracies -- about my family, about Amicus, and about me. It adds nothing of substance to the blog post I already wrote about the mistakes I made (http://sethbannon.com/mistakes-you-should-never-make). The reporter grossly sensationalized the story for clicks which, unfortunately, is all too common a practice in the journalism industry these days.

That's a good point. The ability to talk with someone at a company who's empowered to make such decisions might be what makes the difference here.

Thanks for writing. We as a species need to talk more about this.

What's the goal in requiring the first SMI to detect other SMI being developed but take no action beyond detection? Or did you mean to say that it should detect other SMI under development and then report those projects to whatever regulatory authority is overseeing SMI?

Also, perhaps a better framework for a "friendly" SMI than Asimov’s zeroeth law is the "Coherent Extrapolated Volition" model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intelligenc...). Nick Bostrom and many others believe this may be the most workable safeguard.

"In a world where political systems are increasingly gridlocked every day, and much of Silicon Valley is focused on peddling ads, the civic innovation and open data movements are a bright and optimistic exception to the zeitgeist."

Amen to this! I'm excited by the trend of more hackers realizing that they have the skills to fix a lot of what is broken about politics and government.

Amicus (YC S12) is hiring a lead developer and a CTO. We build a tool that helps nonprofits manage and distribute tasks to remote volunteers. 680,000 tasks have been completed by volunteers though Amicus to date. And 380,000 of those have been completed in the last 8 months.

Stack is Rails, Backbone, Ember, Mongo, on AWS.

For more information, check our http://jobs.amicushq.com/ or email jobs+HN@amicushq.com. NYC, New York.

I agree that some use "billion dollar company" as shorthand for all the things you mention (a great lasting company, solving a real problem, and making a real impact). My point is that while it's often used as a proxy like this, it's a dangerous proxy because it's easily disconnected from the company's original mission(s). In this sense, it's an unhealthy simplification. Surely there must be a better stand-in for a startup's hard-to-measure progress towards achieving their mission than their valuation.