skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's rather naive to think these things didn't have an effect.

The problem isn't the truth of the claims, it's that the illicitly gained information was strategically released to disrupt one specific campaign, effectively destabilizing our election. Much like Comey's last minute email announcement revealed nothing new, yet allowed the email narrative to renew its currency in the last days of the campaign.

Imagine if the IRS "accidentally" released Trump's tax returns or been hacked to allow this data to come out. Or if the alleged tapes went public of Donald Trump making openly racist remarks on his TV shows outtakes. Even if these simply revealed things many people already expect to be true, it would have had mesurable impact on the election.
That's not what "ranking members" communicates; rather, it suggests that the conclusion transcends partisan politics. That doesn't mean it doesn't succumb to other biases (though I don't think so), but it is a meaningful statement to make.
True, but there is currently no strong competitor to fill the NYT's market. "Alternative and social media" are good for populists on both sides of the aisle, but they do not compete with the NYT. A set of strong, trustworthy centrist media outlets is desperately needed, as it's important to the political stability of a country. Without that, you end up with people joining the fringes, on both sides, and a big fat problem on your hands 10-15 years down the line at the polling booth.
So around 52% of Democrats bought into the mischaracterization at some level, lovely. Not to mention a big chunk of Republicans.

I'm annoyed the administration again has decided on wait at least 3 more weeks before releasing a new proof before announcing punishment. Not to mention what will amount to about two months of public evidence free speculation happening in the press (aka strictly citing anonymous Intel officers). And I highly doubt they will ever be able to prove Wikileaks source was Russia which was the only primary direct influence on the elections. Even then it

It's just as likely multiple people had access to the servers. Proving Russia hacked it does not disprove others did. Digital forensics on the boxes can reveal a lot but not everything if they were good.

There has been word the RNC was hacked by Russia but the data was older and of less value. Trump famously doesn't use email nor did they hack any of Trumps 3 campaign managers (as fair as we know from anonymous IC leaks). So it may not even have been a comparable leak even if they (or wikileaks activists) chose to release it. Especially considering how Trump was very hostile to RNC, he would have easily dismissed it as Washington elites doing what he said they do. It might have even helped his 'drain the swamp' marketing angle.

Within this greater context the story of run of the mill nation state hacking of government officials is a relatively minor concern, given NSA does the same, but still a real concern. But the idea that this was a partisan hack of 'elections' and that Russians held back damning data on Trump is on very weak ground.

And let's be honest the Podesta Wikileaks dump was totally underwhelming given the clever hype by Assange.
The same YouGov poll shows that 46% of Trump voters believe the inane "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory is true:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2016/12/28/am...

That is a scary example of what we can look forward to. Now that people don't believe in "mainstream" journalism, they'll latch on to wild speculations with no actual research or journalistic ethics. That is net loss for the truth, no matter how much one dislikes the New York Times and other old media.
9$. VAT, 24%, included.
Who's expanding what part of government here?
I'm pretty sure I remember some compatibility shim being part of the wayland & mir plans in order to support X11 apps.
They are the 2nd most powerful military in the world by some accounts and have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the planet, I think that justifies 35 full time employees. Do you have something better for them to do?

http://www.businessinsider.com/11-most-powerful-militaries-i...
Eyeware “to protect your identity from the growing surveillance-state”
I don't like Russia as much as the next guy, but the US doesn't really have moral high ground here.

The repeating argument in NSA revelations was that intelligence agencies are here to gather intelligence outside the country and on their own citizens. Well then it follows, outside the country it would be pretty weird if Russia spied on US citizens, but not political parties. This goes both ways of course.

Once you see that having an intelligence agency necessarily means you're going to snoop on internals of another government, it would be even more weird if you don't meddle with it when you have the chance. I mean why not? Nation states are out for themselves. In particular if the stakes are high such as when the nation happens to have a good portion of the world's nuclear arsenal, why not take a shot?
Anyone know of good online libraries to find research papers?
You need to consider the fact that Tim is creating a real asset that has a market valuation based on a multiplier of revenue and/or profits.

In the business I created with my cofounder, we never made that much on a monthly basis, but when we finally sold the company, we did very well.

So to motivate yourself, just ask yourself how much would you like your business to be worth if you ever decide to sell it?
So does IE and always do. (zlib, for example, libpng, and a few others). So?
I think it's also worth noting that this was not a particularly sophisticated attack. Podesta fell for a simple phishing attack. A lot of media attention around this has made it sound like something out of an action movie, but the attack itself was actually quite simple. People who have access to so much important information need more training about this sort of thing so they don't just give their password away. It might've been the Russians this time, but it could've been just about anyone, and unless the underlying problem is resolved, it'll continue to happen.
First, the former DNC chairwoman was going to lose her job anyway. The DNC chair position alternates every four years. She was "fired" early to make peace with Sanders, who believed (correctly) that DWS favored Clinton. It was a move to give unity to the party, and possibly to get Sanders endorsement. It's hard to say for certain what would have happened if they hadn't.

Donna Brazile forwarded a single question to Podesto. The optics looked bad, but, as the email chain showed, it was a question they already had an answer to.

Believing this "proves!" anything is ignoring the facts.
I have looked through the report. The only useful information was brief description of attack methods, everything else looks like a list of general recommendations one can find on the OWASP website.

As I understand from report the main methods used were:

- sendind emails with executable files that victims for some reason executed

- phishing

So, they used script kiddie level tools anyone could use (and they are cheap; you don't have to buy expensive zero-day exploits on a black market). But of course this could be done intentionally so it looks amateur-ish.

This attacks could be easily mitigated. First, OS and applications should not run unknown files from Internet (because some people got used to double click on everything they get in email), second, we should start using physical cryptographic keys instead of passwords. Common people cannot handle passwords, they either make easily guessed passwords or enter them everywhere without thinking. I hate passwords too because they are hard to remember (and please don't suggest that I should download some software and upload my passwords to a "cloud" in NSA-controlled country).

By the way iOS is the only popular operating system I know that doesn't allow to execute files downloaded from web or emails. Apple did it the right way.

The report also contains a pretty useless firewall rule named "PAS TOOL PHP WEB KIT FOUND" that can be used to search malware in PHP files. It is interesting that they have replaced digits in 'base64_decode' function name with regexp as if there were any other similar functions.
If your goal is truly to build a business rather than just "side project for its own sake", then you might be trying to launch with too many features.

Best advice I've ever seen on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13213871
Maybe try Planetary Annihilation: Titans?

The original Planetary Annihilation was developed by the people that made the classic Total Annihilation RTS. After delivering the Kickstarted game, they further revised it into the "Titans" verison, and gifted the upgrade to the initial backers.

http://www.uberent.com/pa/

Currently on sale for $6 on Steam too!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/386070/
Ask HN: How did you teach yourself a second language?
Without formal education/classes, what are the best ways to become fluent in another language? I would like to increase my ability to speak German and begin to learn Russian by using many different resources. Advice?
Expanding on this a bit, the concept that Hoogle embodies is extremely powerful and I wish it were more widely available in other languages.

In Haskell's case, due to the particulars of the type system, something like Hoogle is _relatively_ straightforward. More importantly, the same system that makes Hoogle possible also enables safe code exploration and reuse.

Eschewing simpler examples for something a little more production-y, I dug up something that came about after a conversation a few weeks back:

( MonadIO m
, PersistEntity val
, PersistEntityBackend val ~ SqlBackend
) => m [Entity val]

Line by line, the signature (roughly) encodes the following [1]:

1) The context `m` must provide the ability to perform I/O

2) `val` must have some representation understandable by the Persistent ORM [2]

3) `val` must have some backend within the Persistent ORM [2] that satisfies the `SqlBackend` constraint

4) The function provides a list of `Entity val`, where `Entity` is a Persistent-specific implementation detail, within some context `m`.

IMO, this is incredibly useful for searchability because it encodes everything I said above (and more precisely, at that!). Further, these terms can be pulled apart, rearranged, and composed to form more, or less, specific concepts in a query.

This is _also_ useful for code reuse, as seeing these specifications can help identify points of repetition, and encourage higher levels of abstraction.

Apologies if this got a little away from the heart of the discussion and turned into a bit of a brain-dump towards the end :)

[1] I'm not using the most precise wording here, mostly due to my own incomplete understanding of things

[2] Persistent isn't exactly an ORM, but it's the closest analogy I can think of given how comprehensive it is
Russia's hacking and the fake news narrative are both ways for national pundits / news corps that continuously campaigned for Hillary while giving airtime to Trump to escape blame from people who are shocked to discover that Hillary did lose and they're stuck with Trump now.
> There are complex emergent properties here, which your Bose-Einstein condensate lacks. Which is also why it has not practical use beyond theoretical research.

I'm sure someone said that "doping insulators has no practical use beyond theoretical research", too.

> Unless we could change the laws of our universe, we have no way to program its behavior and is therefore not useful.

Something is useful if and only if we can "program" its behavior. Do you think this assertion is true? Would you consider an iron hammer useful? What about bone tools?
Around 7 to 8 dollar/month

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Bucharest?displayCu...
I think that's actually a really good article, thanks for posting it!
Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian Is Marrying Serena Williams
First, we should all probably ignore YouGov, as it has fairly low credibility.

Second, it's alarming to watch people on YCombinator not acknowledge that almost always, the best way to hack a system is social engineering.

And if you combine actual hacking of people at the top of a political party, with social engineering, it's really not a stretch to call that "election hacking."

Sure, it's a little bit sensationalist, but when the DHS and FBI themselves refer to "malicious cyber activity" "by the Russian civilian and military intelligence services to compromise and exploit networks and endpoints associated with the U.S. election", it's really not a bad short summary.
Did they ever send you an email or a text? One thing I've had happen is that if the other person uploads their contacts/address book, you start seeing them as suggested friends.
I hope that some day in the future we learn the truth about this year. Some people believe that the leaks were a few rogue CIA members, others blame a dude in eastern Europe, and of course Russia. I have no idea what the truth is, but I think under the covers there's some interesting drama.
The US does not have a "moral high ground" here, but that's also beside the point. Yes, we interfere in the elections of other countries. We also bomb other countries. And yet, if another country bombed us, we'd be pretty pissed about it.
"Probably not true" seems like a much better fit for "Well...it's possible".
Stop Calling Everything Fake News
It wasn't even a sophisticated phishing attack. If you believe the reporting, the whole thing would have been avoided were it not for a typo.
> It's very difficult to see any marginal ROI for any organization whose end goal is not some form of world domination.

That still leaves a ton of organizations!
There are 3 assembly code exercise: day 12, 23, and 25. The solutions in the post just interprets the code as is, which all run quite a while. I tend to write my code on a much slower computer and I being quite impatient, so I was forced to abort the program and forced myself to actually read the assembly code (input). It is actually quite interesting:

Day 12 calculates the fibonacci sequence, day 23 involves a big multiplication, and day 25 outputs the a number in binary format. If we run all additions and multiplications with "inc" and "dec", of course it is going to take forever (on my computer at least). So for me, I was forced to read the code and recognize the multiplication and algorithm and put in a couple "shortcut". If my computer is any faster, I might miss the fun.
It's definitely easier to get into embedded programming. But blinking a light, or monitoring the air pressure around you isn't going to pay the bills as easily. Compare that to making a simple web application or extension, and signing up for adwords. Almost all programming is easier now than when I was growing up (regardless of area), but that doesn't mean that those areas have all had the same level of growth in terms of actual proficient programmers.

ex: Compare the ease of creating the site at the top of the google search for "subnet calculator", and how much it makes in ad driven traffic vs what you would have to do to monetize even the simplest embedded project.
I think we disagree on the definition of "probably" (≠ plausibly).

For the record, for others reading, the question was: "Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President".

"Definitely true" + "probably true" add up to 52%. Much worse: it adds up to 37% when you include all Americans. That's a catastrophic media failure.
Growing up in Alberta, the Red Solo Cup has also been a staple of every house party I've ever been to.
It's more like

Don't recyclers have to sort submissions anyway? It's expected that citizens will "completely fail" to adhere to recycling instructions and submissions must be sorted anyway.
The labour cost as a percentage of GDP?
>National Anti-Propaganda Center to keep watch over American news organizations.

I googled this term and all I got were conspiracy theory websites.

Here's the actual law: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/327...
"Weren't particular interesting" What? The results of the attack are the entire reason Hillary lost! Remember how it came out how she has two sets of beliefs, "One private and one public", aka tell the plebs what they want to hear then make backroom deals with Goldman Sachs. Did you even read any of the emails?
> I've always wondered: why should recursive intelligence improvement be possible?

That it's possible has already been proven [1]. Obviously there are limits to self-improvement, but we are ourselves limited in similar ways, ie. we are very likely simply finite state automatons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_machine
>I have looked through the report. The only useful information was brief description of attack methods, everything else looks like a list of general recommendations one can find on the OWASP website.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13280068

Look again, they handed you more than enough information.

>The report also contains a pretty useless firewall rule named "PAS TOOL PHP WEB KIT FOUND" that can be used to search malware in PHP files. It is interesting that they have replaced digits in 'base64_decode' function name with regexp as if there were any other similar functions.

root@:~/super_secret_govt_malware_samples# grep * -e bas|tail -n2
D285115E97C02063836F1CF8F91669C114052727C39BF4BD3C062AD5B3509E38:<?php $_f___f='base'.(32*2).'_de'.'code';$_f___f=$_f___f(str_replace("\n", '', 'FeBvsTxs6EyYpYb/gJ9ckCbVgYYH9D56SKL+O6KdPjkDV91JgHr1g8WRH7/uYOda3hUgVLO064UXPF5K
DA9F2804B16B369156E1B629AD3D2AAC79326B94284E43C7B8355F3DB71912B8:<?php $l___l_='base'.(32*2).'_de'.'code';$l___l_=$l___l_(str_replace("\n", '', 'QbO8tTv2NBoj4kUpujJlanEQeWDR+lrAJa6TWEnQEGF/uIiq3/G4ox/YCpaqsd6+QRNaT2pbpyBIDnlo
root@:~/super_secret_govt_malware_samples#

Why is everyone trying so desperately to attack and discredit this report?
A top notch engineer might not want to move from Poland to the US, even if she gets paid 5-7 times as much there. She would give up all her family life and friends, and that's not for everybody. Hence, a Polish company won't have to offer 170k, or even 100k. They only have to get the upper hand of, say, German companies that are reachable via a daily commute, or require only one day per week in the office. I think 60k would do in that case? (Naive guess)
An Open-Access, Digital Edition of the Index of Middle English Verse
Regardless of my opinions on this, it's the comments from articles like this that make me wish there really was a longer reprieve from political discussions on Hacker News. I'd take no political discussion over really heated political discussion, because often in comments (from both sides) people get so heated that I can't even get through one or two paragraphs without losing understanding of whatever point they are getting across or refuting. I enjoy reading HN for the comments primarily, but it seems that when it comes to political discussions it seems worse off than Reddit.
At least some of the DNC users who had VPN access (which, presumably terminated "behind the firewall") had local Administrator rights on the PCs they used [1]. Getting one of those people to load malware and piggybacking on their VPN connection (letting them enter 2FA if there even was any) was likely a cinch.

There's nothing that I've read anywhere that makes me think the DNC was any kind of difficult target to compromise. Likely their information security posture was on par industry norms for small office networks-- absolutely terrible.

[1] https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/8763
This rule is pretty useless. It requires file to be of a specific size and it requires function names not to be obfuscated. One could simply add a space between 'md5' and 'strrev' to bypass this rule.

And they replaced digits in 'base64_decode' with regexp as if there were other similar functions.
I picked one to research (partially because I would have expected MSF / Doctors Without Borders to rate in the "Global health and development" category).

Charitynavigator has this to say about Against Malaria Foundation: "This organization is not eligible to be rated by Charity Navigator because it does not meet our criterion of having nontrivial fundraising expenses."

Oddly, they don't even include Charity Navigator among their six chosen sources.
I remember reading about that. James Cameron's reply was something along the lines of "go walk in a forest" as though city people and urbanites have access to the beauty of real nature anymore.

I mean, don't get me wrong there's all kinds of beauty to appreciate in a downtown metropolis. It just won't be raw.
Headline space is limited. The first sentence is more precise: "...for its efforts to influence the 2016 election".
There's a lot of friction for both buying remote work and selling.

It has to be really worth the other party's time.

Not everyone can be a freelancer, that's one of the points behind the theory of the firm.

Technological advances can and have shifted the % of freelancers, but I doubt it will ever be near 100%.

I say that as both having been a freelancer, currently working semi-remote, and hiring freelancers (both locally and from India and Pakistan).
Robert Anton Wilson, channelling James Joyce, claimed "no man is a solipsist when he is scraping dog shit from his shoe."

It sounds trite, but forcing yourself into situations where you absolutely must deal with the immediacy of "now" is a good solution to existential angst.
GRU spetsnaz is over-hyped. I saw them at work. See video shot at 1 December at Kyiv (Kiev), Ukraine[1] and look at right side: spot few guys with a white cloth on right hand. It's Russian spetsnaz at work. We catched one of them later, in March. They are not so good if a programmer can disclose and catch them.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzJsAzqs5xE
Where to work is a very multidimensional question, but all of the talk (HR, execs, managers, and even potential employees) proxies it into dollars and cents.

I know people who went to Google and came screaming back feeling that they had Stepford-wifed their youth away. I know other smart people working for libraries and universities for a fraction of what they could make just for the tranquility of it.

If you're young and have no responsibilities, don't get too hung-up on the money. Just go out there and try some shit. You never know what's going to be a good fit, although it's usually pretty easy to spot what's going to be a bad one.
Absolutely! https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/feeder

Also posting revenues is never really interesting without talking about costs... Also taxes take a lot from different directions, so even after hosting costs it's VAT and corporate tax and even more. That's when you see the scale needed to actually succeed with it for a living.

As for the other side (marketing etc) I couldn't agree more. Getting in a third person who actually likes that part made a massive difference for us. Not only for the product, but also within the team. I can really respect why having complementing co-founders is so important.
Haha I can't believe Im getting downvoted for the comment. Classic hacker news.

Anyway, did you read the article? He's kicking out a bunch of ambassadors and closing down diplomatic outposts in a way that will be hard to undo.