skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lots of people here saying Facebook probably isn't spying on your conversations are missing the point. I suspect many people finding excuses to exonerate a service they're addicted to. The fact of the matter is that you should be scared of Facebook, because Facebook is fucking scary.

Facebook is a horrifying company. It's the largest and most personal and invasive tracking engine on the net, more so even than Google. They know everything about you. Facebook is tracking and making available to advertisers everything from your employer to your political affiliations to your ethnicity to your charitable donations to your credit [1]. Facebook is (illegally) now combining your WhatsApp information with your Facebook profile [2]. Facebook once collected the unsubmitted status updates you typed and decided against submitting [3]. They track when you are asleep [4]. You already know that Facebook has trained a neural network to identify your face. Facebook engages in censorship on a regular and systematic basis, against journalists and political activists, and regular users too. Even when they aren't censoring explicitly they're building a filter bubble around you that is polarizing our population to extremes.

What happens when they get hacked, badly? Even big companies get hacked and have their databases dumped. Are you really comfortable with everything they know about you being made public? What happens if government actors get access to this data? What makes you think they don't already have it? I saw a stiff give a talk at HOPE who mentioned that they have an FBI agent staffed full-time at Facebook HQ.

You should be scared of Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/08...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/25/whatsapp-...

[3] http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/12/facebook-collects-co...

[4] http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/12/facebook-collects-co...
I'd say each of your three points are seriously exaggerated, but that's really neither here nor there. Why can't we be worried by the content of the emails and the fact that a foreign government hacked them and leaked them strategically to influence our election?

It strikes me as profoundly foolish to not react here just because you happen to be happy that this particular set of information was released. (As well as, by the way, reams of email with no value to the public whatsoever.)

And of course nobody is suggesting we fight a nuclear war. There's clearly plenty of space between GP's suggestion that we do more than tell them to 'cut it out' and nuclear warfare.
> Obama telling Putin to "cut it out" isn't enough

As far as I know, that isn't the plan, and retaliation is planned. Do you know otherwise?

People instinctively want a strong, immediate response in kind. From what I understand, that's actually the wrong way to respond. Here are a couple of points to consider, based on reading a lot of experts (I'm not one myself):

* 'The task of international relations is to prevent C level problems from becoming A level problems.' (I forget where I read that.) Escalation rarely is desirable. That doesn't mean that you don't respond, but that you need to respond in a way that doesn't escalate and put your adversary in a political position where they must re-escalate (e.g., because their populations are angry and demand it). That's how wars begin, often despite the intentions of leaders. Threading that needle is difficult, but that's what the situation demands. For example, after some bad behavior by North Korea, the U.S. responded by flying one or two nuclear capable bombers in an exercise over S. Korea; the point was made but not in a way that required re-escalation by the North.

* "the threat of asymmetric punishment - striking wherever, whenever, and with flexible means rather than retaliation-in-kind in a theater of operations chosen by an adversary - can be an effective instrument of deterrence". [0] If you respond immediately and in the same way your opponent attacked you, you are letting them manipulate you and the situation: They decide when, where, and how you act and the battle takes place (assuredly they will chose situations to their advantage).

Based on the above, a good response has to be smartly chosen to effectively send a message but not invite escalation, and should be at a time, place, and manner of your choosing.

----

[0] Toward a New Offset Strategy: Exploiting U.S. Long-term Advantages To Restore U.S. Global Power Projection Capability by Robert Martinage, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments [a leading defense think tank]

http://csbaonline.org/research/publications/toward-a-new-off...
But from an architectural standpoint, unencrypted data over an analog pair or over a TDM (basically, time multiplexed serial PCM streams; what the phone network uses for internal transport) network is probably better off than ethernet, seeing as anybody can say they're your MAC address even if they're not physically connected to your circuit.
> Horseshit
> you have a chip on your shoulder
> It's bizarre that you get so worked up

Your account has a pattern of posting uncivil comments on HN, which we've asked you many times to stop. It's not cool, regardless of how wrong or annoying someone else is. It's also not cool regardless of how right your views are. Indeed, you discredit those by being a jerk, so if you care about these things, that is an extra reason to be civil.

Please fix this.
Quote from the article:

“We don’t think he actually works for any government or is super sophisticated,” Barysevich said.
I'm not really a go person. I might go as far as saying I'm a go hater. But I feel compelled to defend it in this case. Golang is a deliberately simple language that lends itself well to inspection & tooling. For example, having special syntax for returning errors vs a more generic solution like multiple return values or returning a tuple. It feels awkward but makes detecting unhandled errors very simple.

Seems like there's decent enough tools + emacs/vim wrappers to me. In my mind this is one of the primary merits of go.
Please don't take HN threads on tedious ideological tangents. There are other places on the internet for people who feel passionate about this stuff—here, its predictability makes it off topic. We've asked you to stop doing this before.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13247730 and marked it off-topic.
Pentagon Confirms Russia's Thermonuclear Submarine Bomb Is Real
How the 2011 hack of DigiNotar changed the Internet’s infrastructure
When transliterating code from distributed systems papers (uncomfortably imperative) to Haskell, I had an excellent experience with Lenses and the State monad. It allows you to reproduce imperative, mutable code in functional Haskell and without mutability. The semantics are also much more restricted (in a good way) than imperative code in a real imperative language. For example, you have to specify the entire state beforehand, which prevents you from falling for ultimately unproductive temptations like global variables. You can even do for loops if you want. http://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.9.0.0/docs/Data-Tr...

for [1,2,3] $ \i -> do
counter += i
print i

I wrote a bit about the experience here if you're interested. It was on HN a while back. http://yager.io/Distributed/Distributed.html
Parametric polymorphism alone is a simple yet very powerful feature, but this assessment changes drastically as soon as subtyping (which both Go and Java have) enters the picture. The combination of parametric polymorphism and subtyping creates the pesky issue of determining whether Foo<T> should be a subtype of Bar<U>.

Java-style generics are a lot of things (notably “bolted on”), but “simple” certainly isn't one of them. Wildcards are complex. F-bounded polymorphism is complex. Non-denotable types are complex.
Here's US congressman Pete King, the Chairman of the Sub-Committee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, stating this was all a disinformation campaign by the CIA: https://noagendaplayer.com/listen/886/41-20

Publications like the Washington Post have made some ridiculous claims (clickbait headlines) with zero evidence, and it's been cited heavily for more Fake News.

It doesn't help that the new NDAA bill includes the "Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act" which allows the US government to propogandize the American people. https://noagendaplayer.com/listen/885/1-30-59

The American population is absolutely ignorant.
The best class I took in college (a million years ago) was "Men of Mathematics". Of course today, that course would be impossible to teach as the SJW's would protest the math dept, etc. The text used for the course was a book of the same name from E.T Bell.
And Merry Christmas to you too!
No, we should be pissed when our government does it, we should be pissed when other governments do it, we should be pissed if anyone does it. It devalues democracy in a fundamental and dangerous way. We have been wronged in a multitude of ways, and we shouldn't forgive any of the wrongs.

I'm incredibly tired of hearing false dichotomies here. It is imperative to maintaining a democracy that it not be hindered. We've done a disservice to democracy by tampering in elections, as have the hackers here.
> retaliation is planned.

Source?
We are never going to be able to bully other countries into not spying on us. It just won't happen. We're not going to go to war with the Russians or anyone else over these kinds of breaches and they know it.

The only solution we have is to depend on systems that are more secure. As far as voting is concerned that means paper ballots.

If in the end we can't secure vital computer systems, well, I remember reading an article about the FSB buying a bunch of electric typewriters to create sensitive documents. It's not because they don't have sendmail figured out.
It seems to be a la mode to post a bias or a syndrome for everything. The effects the post refers to are possible and possibly real, only the mediums described seem to be wrong. Heck, I bought a couple of boxers a week ago online, now the whole internet is NSFW for me, all the ads are male and female underwear, including Google ads. I'm quite tech-literate and have a rough grasp of how ads work and how to get rid of them, but a normal user is just perplexed and confused, and all he can think of is the big brother.
Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13249148 and marked it off-topic.
I'll give you (1), but that's on the DNC, not the Clinton campaign. (2) and (3) seems pretty tough unlikely to be substantiated by the evidence I've seen. Hackers released dirt on only one side -- a clear attempt to influence the election, not expose corruption overall.
I'm familiar with that feature, but it is: [0]

(a) opt-in

(b) only active when you're posting a status, not in the background

Whether they save the data or not is immaterial (I also assume they probably do). This feature has nothing to do with sending random background audio to Facebook in the first place.

[0] http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/05/a-new-optional-way-to-sh...
20 years ago you drank milk because there was a massive Got Milk campaign going on, then you watched X-Files, then you saw ANOTHER milk advertisement.

Today, the advertisements aren't about milk, but are about obscure products that eerily match private conversations.
That's ridiculous. A campaign that well funded has folks positioned to see that sort of thing. Politics is nasty business... opposition research and spies are all over the place.

In Hillary's case it's even more absurd to claim that they could have known nothing -- many of the voters targeted and flip flopping were union guys and easy to get intel out of. End of the day, the campaign fucked up.

I come from New York, where we had easily manipulatable, gear-driven mechanical machines for decades. (It was pretty trivial to jam them up, and the historical over representation of the number 9 in results validated that) The major parties understood the margin of error and used absentee balloting to cover that risk.
I'm very likely older than you are, so... no.

It was very good at the time. Not so much today. We've learned a lot in language design and Ruby feels very antiquated (mostly because it's dynamically typed).
Could binding.pry/binding.irb be shortened at all? It's a mouthful.
Dumping the GBA Wireless Adapter Firmware
It's dynamically typed, which is a deal breaker for me today. I need not just a type system but one that supports parametric polymorphism, so definitely not Ruby, Python or even Go.
I'm more worried about Amazon Echo, which really is listening all the time.
"The more you use Dot, the more it adapts to your speech patterns, vocabulary, and personal preferences. And because Echo Dot is always connected, updates are delivered automatically." "Always getting smarter and adding new features".

Some toys listen, too. Toys-R-U pulled "My Friend Cayla" from sale due to complaints from a watchdog organization.[1] "Most devices aren’t recording continuously, and won’t start recording unless activated. You know, a lot of the stuff in the future might get a little more fuzzy.”

[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/smart-devices-amazon-echo-google...
>As has been shown, it's a lot easier to hack voters themselves with targeted information, misinformation and outright fantasy.

Heh. We call those elections, and this is nothing new.
I find that current time management tools worry about the wrong thing. HN talks a lot about UX and the psychology of the things we use. For example, how sticky Facebook or YouTube can be.

I think that time management has in someways had very good ideas, but the tools needed have never existed. Waiting for the tools has been futile. (i.e A todo list with swipe-actions doesn't help you get more stuff done. Switching to all paper can be impractical. Using OrgMode doesn't work well on mobile cause the app isn't super maintained anymore. etc.)

I have always liked the system of keeping a calendar, a list of things todo, and making a habit of deciding which of those things to do today. If I have free time when I should be working I look at the list otherwise: whatever. In more detail it's a mix of Cal Newport's ideas with some of Zen To Done.

I am working on something that I think will help with this software problem. Eventually I'll show it on HN. I think many people on here are going to enjoy it a lot even in the early form I will first release it in.*

* And even if they didn't. It's what I wanted anyways so I still win!
Do we know that Google actually uses Go extensively? AFAIK the Downloads web server is the only piece of Google publicly disclosed to be written in Go.

IIRC most of Google is C++ and Java, which both have generics.
Not only that, but both Wikileaks and Russia have hinted that it was a disgruntled insider in the Clinton campaign that did the major email leak. To those that care about the truth, the leak was a service.
A newer version is available elsewhere.

http://pl.cs.jhu.edu/pl/book/dist/book/book.pdf
Kubernetes is written in go
Not wanting your elections to be hacked doesn't mean not wanting dirt on the government. It's not like we got to read all the juicy dirt on both parties, in which case I'd be more OK with it, though not completely. But when you're only selectively provided with dirt as some external actor sees fit to reveal then you're being played to some extent.

I feel I've been pretty consistent about this as opposed to being partisan; I had a minor spat with Assange over his choices about his approach to editorial framing back when WL was first revealing helicopter footage from Iraq. Wl is a new kind of publishing outlet, but no more neutral or disinterested than the more traditional kind.
With Haskell this isn't an issue because lists are evaluated lazily, but what I was trying to get at and failed to make clear was that other languages which allow functional-like behavior can result in unnecessary allocation. For example in Python doing multiple maps/filters will allocate multiple lists unless you use the itertools versions in Python 2.7.
> That's a strange conclusion to come to.

Why? I posit that a good portion of the customer fallout from this functionality has already happened since so many people believe the conspiracy.

By lying about it, they add a whole layer of difficulty. They'd also open themselves up to lawsuits: companies can't just record your audio and then lie about recording it.

> That number pretty much ensures anyone who has the ability to find out wouldn't bother.

Why? It shouldn't take any sophisticated technical analysis at all.

Ideally we'd have actual network activity proving it, but I'd settle for someone talking to their phone about a product which I choose for them (ie. not something they'd already have on their consciousness) and having ads show up for it. If this feature works how people claim it does, you should be able to get ads on demand for anything you talk about.
They didn't fulfill the number of leads we had paid for. I think they fulfilled 2 of 18. The big mistake we made was paying for the leads up front. We lost any and all leverage we had.
Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9934074

Similar submissions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8590480

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585987

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8593366
Julian Assange has addressed this issue many times.
If you can point to a large internet community where people being jerks to each other results in substantive discourse, I'd love to see it.

However, please don't routinely create many throwaway accounts here. We ban those. HN is a community. Anonymity is fine, but users should have some continuous identity that other users can relate to. Otherwise we might as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be an entirely different site.
> So I have noticed FB recommend people that all attended the same party that I have no previous relationship to.

You probably knew some people at the party though, and some of them had location services on. It's really not hard to guess that you were at a party.
It's a damn shame they only did it for the DNC.
Very true.

And economic problems were a big incentive for everyone in charge to step back from wars. For country's with a strong economy there would be little incentive to stop, especially if AI makes war cheaper.
Functional looks good for applying x^2 to a list of numbers, but when you need to do something a little more complex, it becomes hard to put in in a single line/lambda.
The initial information on that sounded like they were whining about a port scan. Did I miss something about it being a real attack? To me it's maddening that basic nonintrusive port scans would be considered hostile or needing investigation/apology.
2 for sure happened: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/07/do...

You can view it as not that big of a deal, or unavoidable by the nature of employing biased pundits at a news organization that carries out the debates. Whatever. But it happened.

My larger view is that none of these things were overall that significant of factors to a huge portion of the electorate.

More significant were the economic uncertainties of midwest states who viewed Trump's ideas as appealing... while the Democratic candidate failed to campaign in many of these states (Minnesota (she barely won it), Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania). Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate. She almost won, and should have. But I don't think she can blame Russia for her failures.
He also said "Donald Trump will not be allowed to win" the weekend before the election. Pretty sure Julian sees the world not wholly accurately these days :-/
great recap!

iRobot was awesome, but to be fair it would have never been possible with only a general purpose cpu.

so many of those games showed great skills in optimization and design.
Obama said the US would retaliate "at a time and place of our choosing."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/201...
That sounds like (1), not (2). The DNS head leaked a single question to one of the candidates, and it never even did Hillary any good. It's not just not-a-big-deal, it's literally an issue of zero importance that had zero impact on Hillary beating Berney.

Not blaming Russia for Hillary's failures, of course, just pointing out that even intelligent people are super confused by the disinformation that happened this year.
Working memory is better after a barefoot run
That happens when you link your identity with your tribe's identity. A lot of people in the US bought into the propaganda that we're the best or better than others. All that dirt surfacing would be an attack against that identity. It would force us to reconsider and reevaluate, which is a painful process if it requires changing one's identity.
Not necessarily. The hardware guy that got me started on all that was detecting them all the time. Some were really hard but others were obvious once the veil was pulled back. He said he stayed doing that sort of thing as did many others. Constant cat and mouse game. Your statement is true for software people where it will be anywhere from challenging to impossible for them to detect the hardware subversion.
I posted it the day of and it sank like a stone, perhaps people were sick of politics and the mention of the election turned them off.
I appreciate that you were responding to the analogy the parent comment offered, but without concrete criticisms it comes across to me as a sort of haughtiness and an insult to those who haven't caught up or are too blind to have dumped Ruby by now. That seems especially out of place in a thread about a new version of the language.
To calm things down a bit keep in mind the target was a backwater agency called the "Election Assistance Commission" which is not exactly the hive-center of democracy:

"The security firm, Recorded Future, was monitoring underground electronic markets where hackers buy and sell wares and discovered someone offering log-on credentials for access to computers at the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, company executives said.

Posing as a potential buyer, the researchers engaged in a conversation with the hacker..."

Sounds like somebody found a vuln in probably a creaky lowest-bid government contractor website and wanted to monetize.

I've never heard of this "Election Assistance Commission" agency before but it sounds like they exist to help US states implement a law from 2002 called the Help America Vote Act (HAVA.)

I'm not at all comfortable with all these infiltrations, but this "American Election Commission" has done a pretty awful job, hacked or not.

The fact that voter fraud/suppression shenanigans exist or that there's any ambiguity about how votes gets counted indicates to me they're assisting a pretty screwball election system.
Economic Conditions Snapshot, December 2016: McKinsey Global Survey Results
If you're talking about Donna Brazile, she was not the head of the DNC at the time she was giving the Clinton campaign debate questions.

She was employed at CNN. If she acted alone, then maybe you can argue it wasn't "the media" but one person. But how was she able to view the questions ahead of time? She was a known Clinton supporter, no?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/cnn-drops-don...

"From time to time, I get the questions in advance."

"I'll send a few more."

- Donna Brazile to John Podesta

Wikileaks references:

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/38478

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/39807
> With Haskell this isn't an issue because lists are evaluated lazily

Even more than that, the compiler will actually do things like replace

map f . map g

with

map (f . g)

To eliminate unnecessary allocations.
Raytracer.el: a raytracer in Emacs Lisp
Well he's got about twenty days to do something before our new president quietly sweeps this away.