skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm finding the response people are having to this mail in voting thing to be...puzzling.

It's not a ridiculous thing to wonder about how susceptible mail in voting is to fraud, and it seems like some of us are putting blinders on simply due to our distaste for the current president.

If we were to hold a hackathon with a $100,000 prize for the most plausible path to exploit mail in voting in order to swing an election, are people implying that there would be no entries? Or maybe no viable entries? That's ridiculous.

Here's some spitballing: (eh, I removed this. I don't think brainstorming how to committ election fraud is a good idea. I'm assuming that readers of hacker news can probably figure out some relatively obvious ways of casting doubt into the outcome of a mail in election)

How are people looking at what recently happened with 100s of millions of dollars of fraud being committed against various US unemployment systems, and not thinking that other systems might be at risk as well?

Remember the Iowa caucus? That was a hastily put together vote reporting system, not even meant for tallying, and look at what a disaster it was. Now we're expecting that states will radically alter their voting system, in 5 months, and that it won't be vulnerable to interference?

To be clear: I LIKE mail in voting. I have permanent mail in voting status in my state (Arizona), and my wife and I usually get breakfast at our favorite restaurant and spend HOURS meticulously researching every candidate and BI on the form. Being able to take that amount of time is fantastic, and a luxury I wish everybody could have.

But it doesn't have to be so polar. I like mail in voting, obviously, but I'm not so stupid as to think that it cannot possibly be criticized. I am a hacker after all.

Boo to twitter for this. This is twitter obviously putting their finger on the scale of an election, and after all of the drama surrounding the idea that foreign actors might have purchased a few 10s of thousands of dollars of facebook ads, I'd hope that Americans would have a distrust a company where foreign entities have a major stake doing such a thing. Not acceptable in my opinion.

Just to highlight my point a little further: here is an article from the nytimes highlighting that mail in voting is far more vulnerable to fraud than in person voting: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...

Here’s a quote from the article:

>Yet votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show.

and another:

> Election experts say the challenges created by mailed ballots could well affect outcomes this fall and beyond.

And another:

> The trend will probably result in more uncounted votes, and it increases the potential for fraud. While fraud in voting by mail is far less common than innocent errors, it is vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting

So who is to be believed here? Twitter? The New York Times? Why aren’t the experts from this article being listened to?
It's hard to tell Twitter policy from that of the CCP.
iPhone photography hacks for taking better photos
Minor nit: "After his successful tour of Russia, in the late 1920s Lenin sent Theremin to Western Europe, where the legend of his mysterious instrument quickly grew."

Lenin died in 1924.
Oh well, podcasts had a good run.
7 Steps to Approach a Coding Interview Question and Practice Tips
I would say the issue with symbols is why I had trouble with linear algebra in college, specifically dot and cross products. The fact that they used the same symbols as scaler multiplication and are also called products confused my mind so much.
Looks interesting, I checked it out.

I'm curious, is your revenue model to keep all those $2 fines that get charged to roommates who don't do the dishes? :)
You can be as skeptical as you want to be. Even assuming this idea was intended to "make a splash" (it isn't), these sort of comments make no difference whatsoever. We have all seen how HN commenters have criticised ideas that, rightly or wrongly, later went on to become successful businesses. The thing is, this is definitely not intended to be a business. It is just some software that exists and that works. If it works for me, then it is "successful". There is no budding "founder" to shoot down. Just a user with some software that works. The assumptions of "make a splash in the social media space" and "competing with Facebook" are all wrong.

The business of Facebook is not the "comically low" bar of sharing text and images with friends and family. An overlay solution that avoids sending traffic to a third party server is not "competing with Facebook". However it could be used to avoid Facebook which is the point we are discussing here. The fact that only a small number of people actually use a solution does not mean it is a "failure". If the software is relatively small, compiles fast, runs on different OS and architectures, stays available for download and reliably works as intended, then to me it is "successful". The way I evaluate "success" and "failure" of a software is probably different from many commenters/readers.
Giving Credit for Security Advisories
Ask HN: What are your pandemic-inspired startup ideas?
Has the pandemic and your work from home experience made you think of any new products/services that should exist?
Absolutely! A huge amount of "yak-shaving" is fundamentally caused by a lack of maintenance. Self-care is maintenance for your mental and physical health. It might feel like a distraction in the moment, but in the long run, it's a time saver.
Folders : a language where programs are encoded as hierarchies of folders
455,052,512 is obviously not a prime so this must be an error in the article.
The medical establishment doesn't think that eg marijuana is "alternative medicine" or without medical value: the DEA does. The fact that the medical establishment now accepts marijuana as a therapeutic tool is evidence of the quote: it was "alternative medicine" until there was sufficient evidence that it worked. Other drugs which are Schedule 1 (ie without medical value _according to the DEA_) are in various stages of this process (eg MDMA for PTSD).

That's not same thing as saying that there isn't anything which is currently considered "alternative medicine" that works. Rather, once an alternative medicine has sufficient evidence going for it (and is better understood), it becomes less mystical and is accepted as mainstream medicine.
Giving him a platform in the first place is what necessitates the consequent fact checking. If they didn't distribute his lies they wouldn't need to contradict them. Many media outlets have stopped airing Trump's statements live, because doing so is essentially unethical.
I'm glad at least you agree that his tweet is speculation.
What do you mean "interact"? He virtually never posts any responses, the account is close to broadcast-only. There's also no real interaction in the replies: even if you manage to scroll past the kneejerk responses and product spam thriving on controversy, what are the chances you'll find anyone to actually interact with?
I think that only makes sense in terms of the delta between it, and the shitshow that is our current electoral system. In other words, we probably just don't want to admit how bad things are already.
Trump isn’t really “criticizing” mail-in voting in a responsible and measured way here though, is he? He’s claiming that it is a scam by his enemies that will definitely result in massive voting fraud. Is there any evidence for him to make those claims at all? Is there any other way he could have responded, even if he did genuinely care about empowering citizens to vote?
Is that reason enough not to try? Because people will complain? You know very well that people will complain no matter what happens, yet we still must seek to work towards truth and a better way, even though "better" is in opinion word, and sometimes so is "truth."
'What is the truth, but a lie agreed upon.' - Friedrich Nietzsche
Can the FBI do anything if the culprit is not in the US?
As fucked as this is, my distaste for this particular metaphor is somehow the thing that just triggered me to think metaphors are kind of bullshit. You can literally make a metaphor out of anything, apparently.

I'm now trying to figure out if there's a more tasteful way to make really terrible metaphors just for the sake of showing that point... I'm honestly not sure if it would work any other way but to be painfully awful though.

EDIT: I've made progress I think: It is dark humor and requires repetition, but I think what might work is some awful singular simile/metaphor that gets bent into every single shape possible by everyone, like a prostitute. Once the metaphor gets used enough, it could become a one line argument about how "your metaphor sucks."

E.g. "life is like a box of chocolates blah blah blah," and in response "yeah, life is like a prostitute..." (with no follow up). The point being, you totally could follow it up with some bastardized metaphor, but unlike the original person making one, you have the good sense not to continue.

Related: "They called it the Aristocrats"

EDIT 2: It might not have to be darkly offensive, it could just be annoying. Maybe "x is like a sandwich" or something, where you can always just add layers as though they're ingredients.. I dunno. I don't think it has the stain power, but there is a joke here at the expense of all metaphors.

EDIT 3: I THINK I GOT IT!

"X is like (an) onion(s)." Reference to the popular "Ogres are like onions" quote from Shrek. It's not quite as moldable as "prostitutes," and maybe a bit childish. But it has stain power, and could seemingly get the point across.
Lincoln Project called Facebook to dispute warning label on anti-Trump ad
Isn't too much voter turnout bad though? Do we really want every poor ignorant impoverished (or rich) American voting? Or just the people that take democracy seriously and vote after having puzzled it out? If you reduce the friction too much (or even force people to vote) you'll get a lot of voting based on who promised the most goodies/handouts or emotional appeal rather than rational reasoning.
It's called black and white thinking. This side is good, and that side is bad. The hallmark of a weak intellect.
"Hard" is the wrong term. But I'm certainly not alone in being rusty on this stuff. Uncontrolled components, form actions, imperatively reading all the <input> values, `x-www-form-urlencoded` data, etc. If you use this stuff on a daily basis, then I'm sorry for your suffering. I haven't touched it since 2015.
I don't think he actually accused a journalist of murder. He used CYA language like "the investigation ought to be reopened". The implication is obvious, but I think that keeps him out of libelous territory. Of course Twitter can have more strict standards if they want, but so far they've chosen not to.
The article claims that to be the number of primes less than 10e10, not that it is a prime itself.
Removing it from the normal tweet status is separate from preserving them. They could archive them and disable replies, retweets, quotes, and so on. They could remove it from feeds. They could frame it differently.
Hey, we don't let you delete Main.java because Repl.it is all about having sensible defaults, loading really quick, and not being overly fussy and configurable and allow for everything under the sun.

However, we do have some configuration hooks -- the run command is bound to an entrypoint (in this case Main.java). If you want to configure it, you can do so: https://docs.repl.it/repls/dot-replit

Finally, we're a bit conservative with language versions but will probably upgrade Java soon :)
Since numbers are usually introduced to children in terms of quantities of things (e.g. 3 apples), I think it might suffice to stress the importance of keeping these things always attached to those numbers. In general, numbers very rarely go alone.
> is taking away his 1st amendment rights to free speech

Does he have to be on Twitter? I mean, if Hillary can set up a mail server, surely Donald can host a Mastodon instance.
It's sadly missing the RDF inferencing of Blazegraph though.
The problem for me, someone who really wants to be in the middle, is that the only conservative leaning news outlet that I believe (no facts in my reporting) does fact based reporting is the Wall Street Journal. If I want news with data and facts I have to go with the "left" leaning papers.

The Washington Examiner and Fox News have been burning their credibility on a daily basis.
The warning links to this page: https://twitter.com/i/events/1265330601034256384

It's a sort of article (I didn't know Twitter had this type of format, I really like it, weirdly enough) that contains an introduction text and a 'What you need to know' paragraph, followed by fact-checking tweets from press organizations.

I know where the tweets come from, but who has written the introduction and summary paragraphs, and who has compiled those tweets and photos in that order?
I live in Washington State. I mailed my vote in for the 2016 election; doing this is not unprecedented. Why aren't all the expat ballots not faked?
What is my agenda? I'm genuinely curious. Tell me, based on my original post, what I'm in favor of, or against.
Oops. You are right.
That's not a counterargument. Nuance doesn't contradict the black-and-whiteness of the situation. Sometimes nuance just means there are many shades of black.

The same thing can also harm the same people, or a different set of people, or the company, in a way that's impossible to disentangle from the good.

It might be impossible to 100% disentangle. But it is nonsense to suggest it could ever be impossible to >0% disentangle. And they have a moral obligation to prioritize disentangling them, to maximize the good and minimize the harm, and to structurally incentivize themselves to succeed at that.

But your attitude creates the exact opposite incentive: the more entangled the good with the harm, the more defensible it is for them to passively enrich themselves thru their inaction.

Don't fall for it. Demand more.

Demand structural changes that incentivize real fixes, for example, pledging that ad revenue from hate content and fake news be returned to the advertiser and the same amount also donated; or pledging that feelings of community vs feelings of divisiveness affect executive or company-wide bonuses. These particular ideas might be stupid, but don't let them get away with not even trying.
This what a 2012 New York Times article[1] said about mail-in ballots:

>Yet votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show. Election officials reject almost 2 percent of ballots cast by mail, double the rate for in-person voting.

I'm sorry, but that so-called "fact checking" looks like a classic case of "Trump said something is bad, so we must defend that thing at all costs".

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...
There's no simple commercial solution that does exactly this that I know of, but you can get very close with Google Cloud Functions, a GitHub Pages site, and a Google Sheets spreadsheet as a datastore. Not static, but it is fast, and you get a 'CMS' for free (the spreadsheet). Plus all of these services can be used completely for free.
Yeah, pretty much. It's easy for Facebook to claim that it's popular and the best thing going when you specifically need a FB account for contacting people
Yes but the topic is mail-in voting fraud. He was physically at the polling place and stuffing the box. It's fraud and should be punished, but it has nothing to do with mail-in voting fraud.
I think most opponents are not questioning the possibility of hacking mail in election systems. I don't know if the idea you posted would have worked because lots of people can spitball ideas without fully thinking them through. Even so, proponents contest the likelihood of that happening balanced against other considerations, like the disenfranchisement of those who cannot or will not reach a polling place for health reasons.

There is also the question of differential susceptibility. Sure election fraud is possible with mail in ballots. I'd even stipulate that it's easier than casting fraudulent in person votes. But I think it remains to be answered how easily it can be scales, and whether the rewards are worth the risk this would pose to perpetrators' freedom.
The issue is that mail in voter fraud doesn't scale and you need scale to turn a national election. So you can argue this is a concern in general, but someone arguing this is a real problem for the integrity of the 2020 presidential election is being disingenuous at best.
I think it’s more fair to characterize them as corporatist and neoconservative/neoliberal. If the mainstream media were actually left-wing they would be propagandizing for Bernie Sanders. Instead they’re propagandizing in favor of old-guard politicians like Mitt Romney and Nancy Pelosi. But no matter how you slice it, it’s still propaganda.

I agree with the parent commenter that this will only backfire, likely causing the opposite of intended effect on undecided voters. Tech companies like Twitter are not in a position to play arbiters on what is factual and what isn’t. And I think it’s really dangerous both for people to expect tech companies to assume this mantle and also to expect them to do a good (or honest) job of it.
> social anxiety

Yikes, that's kind of an insulting assumption. I just get bothered by sounds, and don't want to bother others with sound (and smells).
It's a bit too urban and dreary for me. I'm from the US and it doesn't match my ideal of Australia; feels too much like a coastal Atlantic city. I'd prefer to be closer to nature, beaches, etc.
We have been using Typora and love it. Very simple. Supports md.
> I disagree, giving certain folks a platform only raises them up and legitimatizes them

Despite huge deplatforming efforts over the last decade fringe views have grown to become mainstream and there is less trust between people than ever.
Oh lordy. The GCP docs. I straight up ignore them most of the time and just search for relevant guides elsewhere. So much of what Google puts up is marketing fluff, high-level descriptions, or at best a description of the happy-path to doing something.

The most galling thing is GCP support. I'm on a team which pays for google support and it is by far the most lax, useless nonsense I've ever encountered. They are literally no help.
For me it took having a friend. We started out as two fat guys, bringing beer on our lazy hikes. Slowly we started competing with each other, trying not to let the other one get too far ahead. Over 2 years we went from lazy fat guys to pulling 12-25 mile hikes and running as much as we could tolerate. I ended up in a shape I never would have imagined, being overweight and un-athletic most of my life.
I should probably sell my Twitter shares soon.
Sorry, that was exactly my point.
And to your "no one is going to pay", that's pretty much exactly what The Great Courses Plus subscription is doing - using relatively nameless individuals in academia to do real teaching. People (including me) pay for it.
One or two hours a day of overlap seems to work fine from my experience.
I think it's reasonable to wonder if mail-in ballots are susceptible to fraud, but there is not a lot of evidence that such fraud is widespread. In particular, Trump's tweet is completely off base with what election experts already know about voter fraud.

> Now we're expecting that states will radically alter their voting system, in 5 months, and that it won't be vulnerable to interference?

Are mail in ballots for everyone really a "radical alteration" of their voting system? Local governments already have the capacity to send and receive thousands of pieces of mail, and the method of counting ballots is the exact same.
There are lot of interesting rules about such ballots. For example, some states do not count them at all unless the margin of victory is less than the number of eligible or returned absentee ballots.
> Han Chinese don't go to prison just for criticizing the government, they just lose opportunities.

This is verifiably false. Han vine Chinese book store owners in Hong Kong were kidnapped to mainland China, incarcerated and forced to sign confessions. Their ‘crime’ was selling books critical of the CCP.
Modern Full-Stack Development: TypeScript, React, Node.js, Webpack, and Docker
Political posts aren’t pleasant for anyone. They are also often meaningless.

Watch as I essentially take the contrapositive of your statement and say << Democrats fight hard to make voting as easy as possible because they are supported by people who are not engaged politically and by people who aren’t invested enough to vote if it takes any effort at all. >>

See? Not pleasant. I’d wager a lot of people have problems with that statement and I’d also wager that I could use each of their counter arguments to my statements as counter arguments to yours.

I see this pattern a lot. Its strange to me.
Well done. My first experience was with Smalltalk/V. I still have my well worn copy of the blue book.
I honestly don't think that teaching ability is that important for MasterClass, because I think the videos are primarily consumed for entertainment and creative inspiration, and less for earnestly learning a skill. Charisma and/or starpower, along with excellent production values, is probably exactly what they want and what they need. It's not Khan Academy.

That's certainly how I consume lots of similar educational content. I watch lots of videos of people who are passionate and experienced in some discipline simply talking about, demonstrating, or teaching that discipline, even when I have little or no interest in actually learning the discipline myself. For me it's cooking, 3d modeling, filmmaking and photography, musicianship, home construction, electronics, bushcraft and wilderness survival, and many more that I can't recall at the moment.
Oh man, I clicked that link expecting a totally different sense of "theme". Setting is closer to the what's intended here, not literary theme.
Let us show Mersenne toward all, and be Stern with none.
Not really, no. That's the WH's obligation, not Twitter's.

Jack Dorsey's public interest is increasing engagement and making money. That's it.
> Given today's anti-free-thinker HN climate

You should champion China to be more transparent about the origins of the virus. Even if it did not originate in a lab, shining more light on its origins will help prevent future outbreaks.

China also actively prevented Taiwan from joining the WHO. This would have resulted in more free flow of information.

Curiously, I was a labelled a racist for making this statement.

> Please, China, Italy, Spain, everywhere, scoop up all the COVID-19 research you can find and act upon it to save lives. Copy

China does not do anything for free. Let us not pretend that China is angelic. Have you heard of debt diplomacy?

So we are excusing one of the most locked up countries in terms of information to hack into cutting edge research in a free society.
Is TypeScript here to stay? It seems popular with frontend dev who like react. Not sure the general development community has bought in.

React hasn't reached jquery status yet. It does seem like it will be here forever but the next generation of frontend tools will look very different. Will react be amoung them? It's hard to make that jump because React is so great now why change it to match the next fad? But if they skip all fads will they miss the boat.

Is react good enough to say we can stop working on it? I don't think we know what react will end up like. It's doubtful it will be around in 20 years like php. I wouldn't bet on facebook being around after laws are passed limiting how they profit.