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Comment by youdounderstand | Hacker News Reader

Dear lord, either Hacker News has a surprisingly large Trump-supporting crowd or it's part of the Russian social media campaign.

Keep sowing that uncertainty and doubt on a report that is backed by classified information. Do you want them to reveal the names and locations of all our spies and detail our sigint methods? The end of the report says what "High Confidence" means.

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I don't know if you are joking or not.

But HN has a liberal bias if anything; however I do believe that most people are a bit disappointed with this report. Maybe having hoped that it would clearly provide evidence that the big email collections WikiLeaks had from the democrats were provided by Russian state actors.

Instead we get half a report on RT which anyone could have written.

I didn't want to say this or bring this up, but I've noticed from a while that when you click on some of the accounts, you'll note a number of them are less than two years old, and have no description. Some are even less than half a year old, yet have >1000 points, and no shares, just that from comment upvotes.

I have a throwaway as the anonymous accounts on HN seem to be called that I use for example, not for trolling of course because I care about this community, but I hardly ever use it and it has probably less than 50 points due to that. How can a 150 day account accrue 10 points per day?

So we're to believe the government without any evidence? That's the classic case of argument from authority.

Just because "argument from authority" was put on some internet list of biases doesn't mean it can not, at times, serve as a useful heuristic.

There's also a difference between "argument from authority" and "argument from a position of known knowledge". Example: radio ad says "Buy milk! We need milk". Will you give it the same credence as your spouse saying the same thing?

"the government" is made up of a shit ton of people. I don't think there's some grand conspiracy involving the intelligence agencies, the Obama administration, and even Republican Senators to make all this up.

You're right. There must be WMD in Iraq.

You're being intellectually dishonest. You have no way of knowing about correct reports that the intelligence community provides the military on a constant basis.

It's "intellectually dishonest" to doubt the existence and alleged content of material we'll never see? That's Orwellian.

Intellectually dishonest? You're the one who started this comment chain with the false dichotomy that anyone asking for concrete evidence is either a Russian shill or Trump supporter.

I think it's really hard right now to know exactly what information to trust.

Or you live in the other 90% of the world, who can't believe how disconnected from reality the US government is.

Right, the other 90% of the world saw how ridiculous the election was with all its focus on email scandals and fake news, then can read Trump's Tweets and see how even further disconnected from reality the US government is about to be.

FBI concluded with high confidence that north korea was behind sony hacks. Anyone who doesn't trust these clowns is not automatically a 'trump supporter'.

1. https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/update-on-s...

Are you suggesting that if one assessment is inaccurate then we can never trust them again? It's undoubtedly not even the same sources or investigators as this report.

Is trusting them because we should trust them somehow a superior heuristic than a track record?

Only if the track record you're referring to is one that you cherry-picked based on your agenda.

do you have an example of a successful investigation involving online hacking ?

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