huilee

I meant "open sourced". I was being sarcastic. I "absolutely love" how literal all of you are. See that? I used quotes that time. Happy F'ing Thanksgiving.

You got it. Was missing the air-quotes.

If Apple open sourced all of macOS maybe that would put more pressure on Microsoft to intentionally[1] open source Windows.

[1]: It has been open sourced in the past:

https://torrentfreak.com/microsoft-takes-pirated-windows-nt-...

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1030335/leaked-wind...

> So how would the hackers, who were obviously highly motivated to achieve their desired result, decide that a 7% tweak in a few counties would be enough to get what they wanted?

Hypothetically, let's say that you're a foreign state and you want to work together with candidate A to pull off a win. You might:

1. Utilize your existing intelligence and hacking resources to expose one or more secrets about candidate B to take advantage of their secretive nature and undermine what would seemingly be their greatest strength, their experience, by leaking info about mishandling classified information.

2. Manipulate* the public in the weeks prior to the election when the undecided are making up their minds by having the FBI director indicate that they had found "more" emails they would have to go through about candidate B that could be a smoking gun of mishandling classified information. Then afterwards have the director state that the emails were the same ones they had already analyzed, such that this would seem more legitimate.

I would think in such a situation, you could reasonably ensure you have a close lead, even with two unfavorable candidates.

In such as case, possibly a 7% tweak could be enough, because you've already done much more than 7% via other measures. Maybe you don't even need to do anything more.

* - I wouldn't have thought that a late game stunt by the FBI director would have been that big of a factor, but anecdotally know of some that were planning to vote for Hillary, but changed their minds and voted for Trump in the end because Hillary came off as too shady.

The point here is not that this is what actually happened, but that this could happen. Foreign states can influence elections in a lot of ways.

And, I think we should have statisticians get involved in trying to restore faith in democracy via giving more credence to the election. It's a good exercise.

FAL3 is not used in LOA- seems like it won't be used much.

Actually, it's normal in HN historically to post links to previous discussions on the same link. There's no reason to get upset about such a comment.

Facebook's a problem, but aren't there plenty of other things online and on your phone that are just as distracting?

For example, I waste at least 2 hours a day on the weekend on HN. I learn a little bit, but not as much as if I had been actively trying to learn a new technology or topic. Also on HN, I get frustrated with others' responses, so it affects me mentally as well. If anything is engineered to be addictive for those in tech, it's HN.

Also, news. I can read news sites for hours. Constantly going back to the same headlines, waiting for something new.

And games. I have a handful of games I'll waste time on.

And deal websites. I want to save money.

The only way to stop all of it? Stop using my phone and computer.