redthrowaway

Lowe's articles have the delightful quality of bringing in people who don't understand the chemistry, and making them feel like they're part of something.

I never got into o-chem, and I certainly don't know anything about excited groups that want to blow off some steam and relax. But I can read Lowe's posts and feel like I'm in on the joke, and that's pretty rewarding in and of itself.

Why on Earth the taxpayer is subsidizing the CBC to crowd out private media is beyond me. It's not 1930. We don't need a state broadcaster to serve an otherwise unserved nation. To the extent the CBC does have a legitimate function, that function most certainly does not include sports, dramas, comedies, etc. By all means, let them adopt the PBS/NPR model. But get them out of the private market, and put my tax dollars to better use.

He had the dubious honour of being the least awful communist dictator. I hope Cuba can move forward now that it's free from his shadow.

Here's their primer on the subject:

http://archive.is/4Uzg8

It's...reaching.

In fairness to the nutters, it's not like the notion there's a massive pedophile ring operating at the highest levels of government is absurd. We've seen them exposed in several Western countries, and both candidates had ties to Epstein. It's just this particular accusation seems to be bonkers.

I would be more surprised if there wasn't a pedophile ring in DC. But I don't think that case will be blown open by Podesta's emails and squiggles on pizza shop walls and a moon and star which is apparently Baphomet?

It's probably been linked outside of HN. Doesn't take too many votes to push it to the top.

It was a stupid decision, but it's not nefarious. He got pinged every time someone wrote "fuck /u/spez" in /r/the_donald, and he got sick of it. So he changed "/u/spez" to the members of the /r/the_donald mod team so they would get pinged instead.

Professional? No. But not nefarious, either.

He was, when he thought he would lose. It's just as bad for the left to make those claims now as it was for him to make them then. Attacking the legitimacy of elections without evidence is bad, full stop.

>You are commenting about a blog post from one of the world's authorities on voting security, a CS professor at the University of Michigan (one of the country's best engineering schools) --- a post other voting security people (for instance: Matt Blaze) have been pointing at.

I'm commenting on the claims of Russian hacking being the latest refuge for election denialists. The reason people are talking about Russian hacking is not due to academic curiosity about the security of voting machines. Pretending that it is, in an attempt to give the discussion an unearned air of impartial dispassion, is dishonest.

>And all you've managed to come up with a dismissal based on partisan politics

My dismissal is based on two things: 1) partisan politics, in that this theory is being pushed by the same people and for the same reason as previous explanations for why the election was illegitimate, and 2) the complete and utter absence of evidence.

>Injecting volatile political arguments unrelated to stories is a form of trolling. Could you please stop doing that?

It strains credulity to assert this discussion was apolitical prior to my interjection.

>The vote counts are off in many counties, including having more votes in a county than registered voters.

This is simply not true.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/demographics-not-hacking...

http://www.snopes.com/audit-the-vote/

There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever of any hacking. Period. There is no reason to believe it occurred. This is just leftists grieving about losing the election, and refusing to admit they nominated a terrible candidate and adopted a platform that is actively repellant to voters in states they needed to win.

By all means, the IC should be double-checking to ensure the vote was legitimate. But the left needs to accept that it was and move past the insane conspiracy theory stage of the grieving process.

I suspect, though, that there isn't a ton of competition for the keywords that matter to them. So the boost you get from hitting HN/TC/whatever once a month might be enough to keep them at the top of Google's SERPs. They did say that SEO drives something like 90% of their business.

I love instapainting's approach to SEO: produce articles like this that are genuinely interesting, post it to HN, then wait for TC and the like to pick them up and reap the link juice. They've also got a few neat little hacks hosted on www.instapainting.com which serve the same purpose. Here's a good writeup on their strategy:

https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/instapainting

There has to be a better article than this one about this weapon.

It's sad to see the tech community, which used to be very libertarian, move towards a hard-left progressive view of social issues. It wasn't that long ago that Friedman's arguments against equal pay laws[1] would have held sway here. The idea that the market punishes bigotry and so can be relied upon to advance freedom and equality used to be a core belief of the tech community. Now, it seems companies are falling over themselves to come up with ever more progressive and authoritarian solutions to problems that have only been complained about in the tech media--driven largely by people who care far more about culture wars than they do about tech. It's hard to see these developments and not feel that something important has been lost.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsIpQ7YguGE

>Agreed; the point of the game is to make you feel like a God.

I would actually disagree. There are plenty of power fantasies, most notably the spectacle fighter genre, which seek to make you feel powerful. Civ isn't about that.

Civ makes you feel purposeful. You nurture and grow your civilization, not for personal aggrandizement but for a feeling of progress and accomplishment. Your goal is not to be the most powerful ruler, but to have the greatest civilization. Human achievement and ambition is the theme of the game.

Complaints about Civ's omission of the dark side of history ring hollow to me. Civ is, at its heart, a deeply aspirational and optimistic game. Watching the Baba Yetu intro from Civ IV[1] gives me the same sense of wonder and pride in humanity that Chris Hadfield's rendition of Space Oddity[2] does. Dwelling on the darkness in our history would be so discordant for a game like Civ.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJiHDmyhE1A

[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo

I doubt anyone at Youtube is explicitly seeking out conservative views to censor. But they have created a system whereby flagging videos you disagree with is rewarded, and an effective way to ensure others don't see them. That won't end well.

Never thought I'd see WP talk pages held up as an example of civility. They certainly weren't when I was there. AN/I, ArbCom, flame wars a plenty.

Stalin killed far more people than Hitler, and Mao killed far more people than Stalin. I'm not sure where this instinct to give brutal dictators a pass so long as they were leftists comes from, but it makes no sense.

>he faces the threat of extradition and execution if he answers the call to be questioned on Swedish soil.

A threat that he, and only he, has elucidated. There's no extradition request in place, and Sweden isn't actually a banana republic whereby the government can order the courts to approve an extradition request.

>Third, the UK has spent millions each year to make sure he doesn't get away.

Well, yes. He's a wanted man. You generally don't want to let those slip.

He's free to answer charges in Sweden. Nobody's keeping him locked up.

There seems to be this progressive instinct to claim that it's not enough for people to believe the same things I do, or support the same people I do, but instead everyone must always denounce the people I do in the ways I dictate or be shamed and boycotted. This instinct is divisive and damaging, and drives away erstwhile allies.

Posts like Pao's and this one, which are intended to enforce a progressive orthodoxy through the application of massive negative pressure, are far less effective in winning over converts than its authors suppose. A lighter touch would be far more effective.

It's been pretty obvious for a number of years that his endgame is whatever Putin dictates. This election has simply made it harder to deny that Wikileaks operates as a front for Russian intelligence, but the evidence was there years ago. Their deep involvement in the Snowden affair and their steering him towards Russia and arranging for him to obtain Russian travel documents to that end should have been a much bigger story than it was at the time.

A mechanism, maybe, but one so expensive, ineffective, and impractical as to be fantastic.

Splitting CO2 will always require more energy than was released in making it. Where does that energy come from? They say solar panels. Because of course they do. But why would you burn fossil fuels to make energy, then use solar panels to turn CO2 into batteries? Why not just use solar panels in the first place? It would be far more efficient.

Also, we put about 10 Gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. 2.7Gt of that is carbon. Just how many batteries are you planning on making from that? Does each person on Earth need half a ton of batteries?

Who's absorbing the astronomical costs of making batteries with atmospheric CO2, rather than with any of the sane carbon sources just lying around?

This plan is nonsensical. It's like solar roadways. It's stupidly expensive, and it just won't work. It's another bogus project dreamed up to make use of green tech research grants that will never see the light of day.

Why would you use atmospheric carbon? It's incredibly energy-intensive to do so, and there are plenty of far saner sources available.

Nature of the twitter beast. You can't actually educate or do much more than say, "read any of the 20 articles I've written on the subject" in 140 characters. And there are a lot of people who are very wrong about the sorts of things he talks about.

He knows his stuff. And he's dismissive and rude. The former forgives the latter, for me.

John Schindler (former NSA counterintelligence officer) called this back in August:

http://observer.com/2016/08/the-real-russian-mole-inside-nsa...

This would explain how the Russians ended up with the source code for TAO's toys.

That's a great idea, and far more likely to lead to real change than simply informing the company. Wipe away millions of the CEO's equity, then watch how quickly it gets fixed.

> I found it heartening that people didn't immediately form the sort of murderous, paranoid, isolationist mobs that film and tv would have you believe.

I wonder how much of that was due to ignorance about how the disease spread. Knowing what we do about pandemics these days, I could see modern people being far more reclusive and distrustful of outsiders than people were back then.