skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The story of how a BLM Activist twitter account and Facebook account with 360,000 (fake) followers was trying to organize riots in Baltimore but was actually run by Russia? And the BLM Leaders shut them down because they were from out of town.

This guy Heber Brown should be feeling pretty good right now. He even has a screen-cap of him reputing the Russian agent. [1]

My one question here -- where was the NSA/CIA on this? If Russian is running such an incredibly nuanced misinformation campaign to incite riots in America, why the fuck didn't they identify it while it was happening, expose it, and stop it?

What we have here is either (a) insignificant, or (b) a glaring failure on the part of US intelligence. But my better guess is that the story completely falls apart at some point. These always start out so exciting and then utterly fizzle.

Did you notice the quick turn of phrase? It's no longer Russians influencing the election, now it's Russian influencing politics. When Russian agents are trying to rally protests in Baltimore, and they are doing it publically on Twitter and Facebook, let's see all the data and expose it, right now. If it's actually happening, it should be shockingly easy to detect.

[1] - https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10154097683603610&se...
Gimme a break, just because someone is from Russia doesn't mean they should be immediately dismissed. In fact, one might say that their opinion might even be valuable if we weren't in the midst of a Red Scare. Loyalty to the Obama-Clinton block is what got us into this mess. Neither it nor Trumpism is going to get us out.
To me a much simpler explanation is that people in Russia are incredibly sad and life there is very sad and hard. However almost no one there realizes it until they get out for a prolonged period of time.

Me and my wife were born and spent most of our life in Russia, we were pretty well of and yet since moving to US we realized how sad it actually was.

The collective consciousness of Russia is still heavily polluted with pain, fear, uncertainty and mistrust of everyone because of the terrible events that unfolded throughout it's history, but mostly in 20th century. Millions were murdered and executed during and after the revolution, more were executed before 2nd world war, 10s of millions died in the 2nd world war.

Repressions, starvation, constant economic struggles nullifying people's saving and results of life's work and at the end of work life, a sight of a miserly pension that unifies everyone, regardless of previous status in life, in poverty. Most old people who live on a pension look like homeless people in US.

Russian families mostly are highly codependent and dysfunctional, a lot of men drink and women resort to constant unhappy nagging and displeased demeanor. A lot of spouse relationships play out the role child/parent, where the wife is being a parent and husband is being unruly child, avoiding the responsibilities and hiding from the consequences. Public displays of affection are almost non-existant, very hard to find genuinely happy couples, especially those who've been married for a while.

The country itself has terrible ecology, most cities struggle with crazy levels of pollution because of the car traffic and factories built within city limits. A lot of cars are from soviet times so they produce a lot of smoke, sometimes after a bus passes you by you can't see anything because of the clouds of black smoke.

The cities are covered in soot and the roads are covered in dirt, sand and road salt. That dirt is everywhere, covering the trees, cars, houses. It's unthinkable to live in Russia and don't clean you shoes every couple of days, because they get very dirty. After every rain the dirt is everywhere. All of this combined makes cities look grey, especially during the spring, winter and fall, excluding the short summer period that lasts usually around 3 months where green of the trees and grass dilutes all of this a bit.

Don't take my word for it, here's the real Russian news site of the city Krasnoyarsk, population 1 mil. It shows center of the city:

http://prima-tv.ru/news/incidents/43896-sosulka_ubila_muzhch...

To me all of that explains really well why there's not much to smile about. If you're smiling without a reason people see you as someone who have things going well and feel jealousy and want to bring you down in their own heads to justify their own misery.

A lot of people in Russia leave in the denial of the true causes of their suffering and unhappiness and I'm sure they'll downvote this.
http://www.hnclone.win/login

If you try to create an account you get an internal server error. I assume that is what the OP means.
Second Hubspot, great for SaaS companies that focus on inbound marketing. The CRM product is free. If you're a startup, they have a program to get 90% off their other products.

Whatever CRM you use, look for one that integrates with any customer related tools that you're using. Larger players like Hubspot can attract more developer integrations. For example, we use Drift (Like Intercom but much cheaper) for customer support and sync events in Drift to Hubspot.
HDCP (the DRM tech for HDMI) was not very well designed, and the master keys were cracked some years ago.
Fleecing the retail investor again. Sigh.
A bit more haunting for me on the east coast, the Pentagon:

https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/detail-sovi...
> People like Louise Mensch going around shouting "impeachment is coming!" to anyone who will listen isn't helping.

That's exactly my point. That overreaction is what's derailed it. There have been nothing but empty promises for "that's it, it is just around the corner, we have the smoking gun" and then digging deeper, there is not much to go on there.

> It's a modus-operandi of the Russian intelligence apparatus

I believe that. KGB has been doing that since it was formed. Technically they might not have been sophisticated but they were good at planting stories and spinning narratives. I remember the "US govt created AIDS to kill all the black people" fake news.

> Was it small-scale, or a massive operation?

The investigation has been going for a quite a while, I don't believe there is any evidence of meaningful interference at this point. Mostly it is about fatigue listening to empty promises. There is an opportunity cost here. The more effort is spend here, the less time, effort and attention is left for more important things.

But I also believe that any country out there with enough resources would trying to influence US officials. I gave an example of a Qatar handing out a $1M birthday gift to the husband of the US Secretary of State.

> Why? Bill Clinton's not in power, last time I checked?

His wife was in power. Who also later ran for President. Thought it was an interesting connection there.

> Almost the entire Wikipedia page for the foundation is taken up with "Legal & Ethical Controversies".

Exactly. Let's talk about that, there seems to be more there to go on than Russia.

> Going "but look at the Clintons!" rather undermines the discussion.

As I mentioned, that was more about the scale of what kind of evidence is expected given the allegation made, and the energy and time put into this topic. $100k worth of ads for Black Activism don't fall near that.
Not if you want to listen to a specific program at a specific time, or if you move between your desk and your car on FM (as you'll hear the same songs), or if you want the local news broadcasts which are embedded in the west coast stream, or even just if your mate has a propensity to text you to talk about how great that song just was.
To Scott:
Your hostile response says to me the lessons are not as obsolete as you may have convinced yourself that they are.
Yes, definitely. I flagged the comment for that reason.

You can disagree with the original comment. You can downvote the initial comment. You can flag the initial comment. Hell, you could even engage and reply to the initial comment.

But I don't want to see the personal attack.
So it's the latter then. Nice talking to you.
This example is not the surface of a real donut. It's an abstract surface.

In the surface of a real donut you have a lot of problems due to the curvature and the different sizes, so the calculation is very complicated. For example, in a real donut the circle at the top and at the bottom of the donut have different length that the two circles at the equator. In the torus in this page all the horizontal circles have the same length.

This is a magical torus, where all the horizontal and vertical circles have the same length. It also has no Gaussian curvature. You can't construct one of this magical torus as a surface in the 3D space, but you can construct one as a surface in the 4D space.
Even games that don't have to be clicky are waaay too clicky.

Torchlight isn't too bad. Hearthstone isn't too bad (but has a terrible terms and conditions.)
The interview questions don't sound particularly rigorous, but asking someone to pick a programming language and do something simple with it sounds like a good way to make sure that they at least have actually done programmed before. If the job involved any type of programming, this would seem to strongly correlate with success. What do you think would be better?
Please elaborate. I bet you'll find the line is very difficult to enunciate and still believe in First Amendment type free speech.
Pardon my ignorance, but I thought Blackmagic's claim to fame was always being on the low end of the pricing for their tech.
I teach my children to never trust anyone.
Not "didnt have them..." rights that were usurped by the majority for fun and profit. There is a difference. Getting what back $10 that was stolen from me is not the same as making a new $10.
I don't know why we keep gravitating to Raspberry Pi's for this. IPFS works just fine on Windows clients. (By which I mean, it's no less stable than on Linux, neither of which runs particularly well at this early stage.)

What if publishing to your blog was as easy as installing a Chrome web extension that now travels with you? Suddenly every computer you have that runs the extension can pin a local copy of the site, and your visitors help out by virtue of the protocol. This doesn't exist of course, but thanks to ipfs-js, it could, very easily. There are obvious drawbacks to this approach of course, but my point is that the "Hello World" of this kind of app could easily be much lower bar than setting up a Raspberry Pi.
You derailed the entire point of the article by taking a tangent into a completely different, essentially irrrelevant, discussion.

“Bitcoin's electricity consumption as a percentage of the world's electricity consumption	0.09%“

How about Bill Gates and Terrapower trying to build a new generation of nuclear power in China?

https://qz.com/627113/bill-gates-says-china-is-the-best-plac...
I thought the same and this video [1] changed my mind. It demonstrates that smartphones and internet connectivity are essential tools to navigate international borders, remain in touch with family, access legal aid, find camps, food, shelter etc.

[1] https://youtu.be/m1BLsySgsHM
...but black to black violence is much more frequent than any other[0] (incl. white to white and black to white, percentage wise), so for blacks that "survival strategy" is not doing much for survivorship.

Relevant quotes:

>Those 7,881 “black bodies,” in the parlance of Ta-Nehisi Coates, are 1,305 more than the number of white victims (which in this case includes most Hispanics) for the same period, though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population.

>Black males have made up 42 percent of all cop-killers over the last decade, though they are only 6 percent of the population.

>Four studies came out in 2016 alone rebutting the charge that police shootings are racially biased. If there is a bias in police shootings, it works in favor of blacks and against whites.

[0] http://nypost.com/2017/09/26/all-that-kneeling-ignores-the-r...
I’m mildly surprised by how well Clojure performs here. It isn’t statically typed yet fares much better than Haskell/Scala! From my experience Clojure is also a joy to write, sometimes even more than Haskell.
news.ycombinator.com which is faster and has 0 js deps.
Your feels are not why the Green Book exists and the Civil Rights Movement was not to move past mentalities like his. The Civil Rights Movement was to make white people stop systematically oppressing black people and taking advantage of their persons and their property. Those survival mechanisms you half-heartedly nod to are still necessary today because the police in America will kill you without a blink if you're black and the likelihood that they get away with it is very, very high.

Re-casting the movement to make white people stop oppressing black people as a shot at "mentalities like his," when white people have been oppressing, killing, and enslaving black people for the entirety of the history of this country is beyond the pale.

And, to be very clear, I am white. I'm also not dishonest, though, and that matters.
What do you find is the benefit of caffeine that couldn't be said of nicotine or alcohol?

Obviously they have different effects, but the people using each of those various drugs find the effect desirable.

Also, what's the point of starting caffeine later in life? AFAIK studies show that people who use no caffeine are generally more energetic/alert than those who use it regularly; it only works in the short-term.

I also think there have been studies that show both wine and coffee can be good for your health, so there's that, too.
It depends on how you define "distance". My initial thought when reading your comment was that you couldn't possibly use the Euclidean distance because you'd be drawing a path between two points on the circle that involves points _not_ on the circle.
I have experienced both cases, in varying quantities. Sometimes I have a headache very quickly (after a small amount of alcohol), and oftentimes I have a headache if I drink too much.

On the other hand, I often experience no obvious ill effects, particularly with limited consumption.
It will be interesting watching the Russians tear America apart without ever firing a shot. Just slowly sowing the seeds of chaos and manipulation, taking advantage of American ignorance and naivety.

Eastern Europe has gone through this already. The Russians have installed a 5th column throughout many countries and have become excellent at sowing misinformation and manipulating the populations. Democratically elected Governments are struggling to contain the campaigns of Russian Intelligence against them. Money pours in along with agents to fund groups that otherwise wouldn't have a chance.

America is in the cross hairs of a massive this Russian Hybrid War. Considering they are dealing with millions of people who couldn't even find Russia on a map it shouldn't take much to incite madness in the streets. By the time they are finished with this there won't be much of the America you or I know.

I have the means to run...where you going to go?
x1 = 0.9

x2 = 0

x1-x2 = 0.9 => -0.4

I don't see how this works.
Too bad you can't (edit: very difficult to) get a PhD, in the US today, without going at least into an order of magnitude more debt (or in debt at all) while in undergrad when comparing to the early 1980's.

I did hear of a German uni that accepts people for PhD programs without an undergraduate degree, but iirc you need like 4 or more publications. But that seems like an exception to everywhere else.
NASA has a nice summary of the rights the government has to contractor created works.[1]

A contractor may claim copyrights, but the government still has a license to the work that allows them under most circumstances to do anything they please (for the public good) with the work (e.g. publish it in the New York Times) and also release copies for reproduction (as long as you reproduce the copy you got directly from the government).

The general counsel of any agency can explain what the agency's rights are for any given work.

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/531751main_Government%20Data%20Righ...
Ai yai yai, this sort of personal attack, crossing even into national smear, is totally out of line on HN and is easily a bannable offense. I won't ban you because you haven't made a habit of this, but if you do it again we will. I haven't been so shocked by something a HN user has done in a while.

In the meantime please re-read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post only civil, substantive comments from now on.
Also against individual IQ worries
I'm amazed that DuckDuckGo is going from strength to strength. But that may be due to some algorithmic stumbles by Google. I've switched to DuckDuckGo because Google's AI would rather fantasize a different question than answer mine.

Previous tech history suggests that the big ones (like WordPerfect) go down when they stumble or just ossify and refuse to improve for a long time.
Why do people just throw their money at random ICO's? It makes no sense. All they read is a whitepaper, and badabing badaboo...there goes your money. There is literally a site that lists coins deemed safe. That is sad that people in crypto need that. However their forecasts are spot on: https://www.cryptonaire.com

I think they are also working with regulators to help with this ICO stuff.
> I don't understand how the HN crowd that is usually so pro-environment, is also happy with the tons of wasted energy from crytptocurrency mining

Iirc that's one of the points of proof-of-stake. PoS is nearly analogous to PoW in its platform implications - potential for centralization due to resource costs and so on - but doesn't rely on burning through processing power to be secured.
A Look at Hacktoberfest
> where was the NSA/CIA on this?

Great question. Why isn't the NSA working to secure the systems of Americans and our companies? Instead, it seems like they are devoting most of their resources to inserting back doors into commonly used software and generally subverting secure systems. Oh, and letting people like Snowden steal it all and give it to Russia. Very frustrating to watch the incompetence, indifference, or whatever is going on.
I'm not sure how you got from the title to the question. How are these related?

I can tell you from my current experience with pricing, businesses seem to hate variable pricing, even when the fixed price (monthly fee) is greater than they would pay if paying a percentage (though my pricing was usage based not as a percent of x).

Percent feels like a tax, and nobody likes taxes.

You're probably thinking of it from the perspective of "the more money you make, the more money I make, I'm only charging you for the service". But that is likely not how the business is thinking of it. They're thinking that they do all the work, and you can't even give them a price of what they are going to pay. You'll just "take" more for everything that they work so hard to build.

If what you are providing is something they can't live without, like the App Store, then you can probably get away with charging a percent, and your customers may hate you for it.
> people who are afraid for their own economic circumstances and safety are responsible for that reputation

It's not "economic circumstances and safety" that makes people invent hordes of dark-complected rape gangs out of whole cloth (that would be Pegida, a neo-Nazi group who invented the "Cologne rape gangs" and other similar swill). And the people casting racism as "economic insecurity" are themselves racist propagandists, my dude; it is air cover for bad shit. They do not deserve your buy-in or your charity.
Agreed - you can have compiling code that passes all tests but which still needs someone to review. Or a feature that you are working on that you want to merge in later.
So question, despite the Russia madness appearing to be BS, it did, via machinations by the FBI, give us a Special Counsel which will in all likelihood destroy Trump based on his corrupt business practices unrelated to Russia.

I can't decide if this is a good thing or not. The winners won't be a real left party, they'll be mainstream Democrats (centrist-liberal establishment capitalists) assuming impeachment doesn't start a civil war. On the other hand, we'll be bereft an authoritarian racist that is diminishing this country each day he is in office as he dismantles social programs and blows up the climate.
For anyone curious, I’m guessing “MD simulation” means https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_dynamics

Folks who use this kind of distance measure might note that it also works well as a metric between angles (i.e. rotations) or between points on the projective line. For instance, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJAn--vsAzc (unfortunately not too self-contained a source)
Instead of trying to shut them down yet again, perhaps it's time we took seriously the fears and experiences of black people. The evidence is pretty overwhelming that they are very real (not that I would have reason to doubt them).

> That's not to say discrimination doesn't exist today, and maybe "Never Trust Whitey" was a survival mechanism in the Jim Crow south, but I was taught the whole purpose of the civil rights movement was to move past mentalities like yours.

The reverse racism bit isn't real if you think about it. Allow me to ease your mind: You have nothing to fear. You won't be lynched; racist police won't make you drop your pants in a 'stop & frisk'; if you do get arrested, the court system is mostly run by white people so racism won't cause you to be put in jail and be given a disproportionately harsh sentence; the laws are mostly written by white people so you won't have to worry about near-open discrimination, like the war on drugs, or just plain ignorance about the problems you face; there won't be a whole major party running on subtle discrimination against you with dog whistle messaging; almost every job you apply for will be with white people, so your skin color won't hurt (and will often help) you there; your kids won't wonder if they are inferior, because everyone they see on TV and in leadership will look like them (except for the criminal characters on TV); you won't have to have 'the talk' with your kids about the police; you won't have to worry about how to give them realistic expectations, such as they will have a difficult time in certain careers - what if they want to be police detective, governor of Alabama, or star developer in Silicon Valley? You're safe; take a deep breath.

I just read an article in the NY Times about NYPD police detectives. In the intelligence division, a premier assignment dealing with terrorism, almost all black officers were put in what was called the "Rap Unit"; their job there was security for prominent entertainers (rappers, I presume), and they were promoted at far lower rates than white peers.
And moving past mentalities like those of the parent post would naturally secure those rights even more strongly.

For my part I was taught that not trusting people on the basis of race was racist and that I shouldn't do it. I was taught that making general assumptions about people based on race was racist and that I shouldn't do it. I was taught all this as early as kindergarten.

Sure there are some areas today where "never trust whitey" might still sadly be a survival strategy. You could also say it's a survival strategy for a black person at a Klan meeting. The issue is applying it as a general rule as the parent poster did. We're not going to solve any of the remaining racial inequalities if people categorically refuse to trust each other on the basis of race. That's arguably the definition of racism.
Now I'm on a natural disaster video kick. Here's the tsunami in Japan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_0rQ9hnP84
Rockets bound for Egypt reveal North Korea's dark trade
Teen sex is not on the decline, we just ask the wrong questions
Pipedrive is excellent.
Just wait until technology like this [0] becomes more common place, which I guess will be either the next US election, or the one after that. It's going to be a crazy world.

0: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/adobe...