skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One possible way out of the trap is for regulation to acknowledge and classify these massive social media and content delivery platforms like YouTube and Facebook as the new version of the public square.

One of the big issues with the demonetization on YouTube is that it's a binary flag -- either "acceptable content for advertisers" or "unacceptable for advertisers." As if advertisers were a single block with a single set of values!

When YouTube is not under an obligation to act as the virtual-public-square (because "they're a private company"), then they are especially vulnerable to defining that "acceptability" either by internal ideological conformity, or by external ideological pressure. Part of the concept of "free speech" (as a doctrine, not just as 1A legal structure) is that it allows for a society where the distinction of "I don't agree with this but someone out there might and so it's OK for it to exist" is a distinction that is possible. Without that, we're left with a world in which expression has to be mediated by the approval/whims of external forces for it to be present.

Whatever strange, fringe things this person was having as YouTube videos, I'd be willing to guess there's some fringe company out there who wouldn't care if they were advertised on those videos. Think of the kinds of advertisers 4chan, Infowars, or adult websites get. Their standards don't fit into a generic mold of "acceptability." But if someone was a video creator who wanted to court such advertisers, what kind of audience would they even be able to build without access to the de-facto public-square that YouTube is?

I don't know how to get there from here. But I think a more healthy ad-revenue model would somehow have YouTube saying "OK, these mainstream videos are able to be monetized by mainstream ads from companies A B and C, while these fringe/controversial videos can be monetized by whatever companies X Y and Z want to."
The so-called-better-way of doing this using Unicode substitution can be found at http://smartdata.cs.unibo.it/watermark/
Introducing SWIFT Financing
Reminds me very strongly of "Idoru" (1996) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru

> “If you think about social media, Instagram isn’t you. It’s just a digital version of you – one that shows photographs, sometimes videos, and comments on specific things,”

"Ceci n'est pas un pipe.": the image is not the thing, and there may be images without referents.
Yup, but it won't happen with "transparent aluminum", it behaves more like a ceramic does, so don't expect to indulge your bending and denting urges on it.
Of course they have the right to, but they also should value the open exchange of ideas in society, regardless of what's written in the Federal constitution. That open exchange is hard to have when folks on one side attempt to destroy the livelihood of the folks on the other side rather than argue their ideas directly.
Storage Made Easy in UK Secures £3M
Self-immolation is nowhere near in the same ballpark as taking a gun into an office and murdering a bunch of people.

I really don't like the parent article's line of thinking of explaining or justifying this person's act. There are plenty of ways of protesting that don't involve hurting others. And it's mind-boggling that we have to point that out at all today.
> The irony is that reporters themselves are driven by advertising pressure.

I don't see the irony. Perhaps they are just saying "my content is better, that ad-money belongs to me!"
> There's a huge difference between being silenced and being refused ad placement on your videos.

If there's a huge difference between the impact that being silenced has on someone compared to having their primary source of income abruptly taken away, I would expect the latter to be worse for most people.
I down voted because your argument assumes the market is not monopolised. I think you could have made a valid case but you don’t seem to acknowledge the complete economic situation in this case.
I'm fairly certain they were including that in the media's reaction and participation in this.
YouTube is not transparent about it's algorithm, this produces a lot of frustration because of uncertainty.

The algorithm also seems very poor implemented, like it should give the benefit of the doubt, like if I have 10 wrongly flagged videos that a human decided it is advertising friendly then mark my channel as "trusted" and don't allow the AI to de-monitize the video , flag it and have a human check it.

In the present the algorithm is favorable to YouTube and advertisers and creators suffer.
Practical Attacks with DNS Rebinding
It's very interesting to me that the shooter was basically a disgruntled user who complained that the platform discriminated against her and filtered her content.

I think this and Cambridge Analytica means that we're finally entering an era in which the public is conscientious of the fact that the massive power wielded by "big data" platforms, combined with the lack of transparency, has tangible adverse effects.

Hopefully this paves the way for more transparent (and beneficent) visibility into how such data is consumed and used, possibly by using public utility-like regulation [1][2].

[1] https://datasociety.net/events/databite-no-105-k-sabeel-rahm...

[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2986387
>Let's back up. Opposition to free speech looks like using power to shut up ideas. Free speech, in contrast, prefers that ideas are best addressed with better ideas.

No, that's absolutely false. Opposition to free speech looks like using the government to censor people. FULL STOP. Shaming people who say bad things isn't opposition to free speech, it is itself free speech to respond to their free speech. You insistence that we should "be silent" in the face of those who say bad things is an assault on free speech IMO, and your "bullying" line is again an attack on free speech. "Don't respond to my speech, bully! You attack my rights when you use yours!"

Please read the American constitution. In America, Free Speech is a special concept and you have ignored that.

>So GP criticizing tweets is fine. And I think it's a fair thought to consider whether these boycotts are just a combination of free expression and free association or whether they are more like expressions of social power and therefore bullying.

Protip: Bullying bad actors is free speech, too. I have no problem with identifying anti-social speech and using social force to reprimand and demand conformity.

This is how you deal with racism and other anti-social behaviors. Shaming. Or if you prefer, bullying.

But you won't catch us with the Paradox of Tolerance. Intolerance of intolerance is vital the health of tolerance.
> Simple execution model for server-side apps: each request is practically a separate process, sharing nothing with the others

It occurs to me that this isn’t a technical impossibility with JavaScript. It wouldn’t be difficult to write a library that spins up a new node process for each request. It’s just less efficient and goes against the grain of the language. (Having asynchronous IO)
You are really making an elaborate case with your well thought out arguments and your classy choice of words.

If ever one needs proof of the validity of an argumentation it would be delivered right in your style.

Sorry for my cynicism here. But ad hominem cursing and the defamation of people not able to defend themselves with unproven allegations is really below the HN standards (at least I hope that to be the case).

[Edit:] Typo
A lot of those videos were of content that no company in their right mind would want to place their ad on. One of her channels was demonetized completely and from the look of it she separated her channels by language so if one isn't eligible entirely and the other channels are basically the same content in a different language it doesn't sound unlikely that many of those videos were demonetized as well.
Long back when this started, OpenDNS was the largest public DNS provider. And I know at one point they started "hijacking" google requests - you can read this here : http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r21284386-Google-Com-Hijacke.... This was in 2008. They used to also hijack DNS requests to show their own ads. And i am pretty sure many ISPs always played around with DNS in this way.

In 2009, Google launched its own Public DNS - the reasons given were to make the web faster and safer, and i think there is some sense in which they have delivered. But I think another reason was defensive - provide an alternative to OpenDNS and to crappy ISP DNSs.

In 2014 - OpenDNS stopped using DNS to show ads : https://umbrella.cisco.com/blog/2014/05/29/no-more-ads/.
Should people be forced to provide for a platform that they find hateful and offensive?

You can make a point about government not being allowed to deny groups the freedom of speech, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with private people voting with their wallets to show where they stand in relation to speech that they feel that is threatening to them.
Itch.io is the open bazaar of digital distribution platforms, so yeah there's going to be a lot of crap in there, but it is that open model that gives it value. Also I hear they have exceptional tooling for developers.
Media/fashion models are “real” similar to how exotic supercars are “real”.
How does the discrimination and filtering on youtube justify the murder? I just don't get it.
The Internet was supposed to be about the free exchange of information.

People treat Facebook, Google, etc. etc. etc. as if they themselves are "The Internet" when they are publishers. "You" are not publishing content on YouTube, YouTube is publishing your content. Just because they do almost nothing to curate what they publish, doesn't mean the little they do is some civil rights violation. We're learning with the Russia+Facebook thing that there is a fundamental problem with third party corporations publishing and promoting anybody's content automatically.

Nobody claims the New York Times violates free speech when they won't put some radical wonk's opinion on the front page.

If you want to publish your content with your own hardware on the Internet, you can. The tools aren't very good to do it, but you can. When the problem becomes network providers censoring your views, then come back to me.

When your definition of "censorship" becomes advertisers refusing to pay you for your whacky extremist views, your view of freedom has become distorted from the liberty to expression to the freedom from criticism.

YouTube, Facebook, etc. do not owe you publication rights. They are not public spaces.

The threat to freedom isn't non-public spaces exercising their rights, it's the nearly complete lack of actual public space online for anyone that isn't wealthy or a hacker.
Are you seriously, in the age of the Internet, the age of self-publication, the age of the most blogs, vlogs, podcasts, shows of any era in history... that there exists a monopoly on speech platforms?

That's the most utterly ridiculous thing I've heard today.
Is the story about the $25m forged cheque true, or not? http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/12070/
Nvidia already had two generations of Shield products, and the third generation was hotly anticipated. After a delay, it was revealed that the Switch was going to be the third "Shield" generation. Nvidia was always going to make another tablet.
Ackchyually?
Meryl Streep should be worried right about now! (I heard that last set of renders... whoa!)
Of course not. I'm referring to hints of victim blaming in the media: https://www.recode.net/2018/4/4/17196704/youtube-susan-wojci...
In this case the advertisers don’t get a choice. Under GDPR data subjects have to opt in to personal data collection and processing by third parties, and they can’t be denied access to the service for failing to opt in. The advertisers are going to have to get used to a new reality of mostly targeting page context.
The fact that you suggested ignorance as one of the possible reasons for millions of people preferring Spotify over Google Music speaks quite a bit towards your view of how important your feelings are.

If I ask you "Hey, why would you ever prefer the shoes you like over mine? To me, it's an obvious choice. Is it just because you don't know any better?", would you interpret that as an honest question?
This is a very focused platform for kids to learn coding for games.
It's a little humorous, as it really does indicate that the people who are complaining that their free speech is being attacked, are themselves, attacking free speech.

I'm not sure any of the people arguing points and counterpoints in our society's current free speech debate really value free speech?

I think it'd be a bit more accurate to say that these people value THEIR speech and freedom, not really the speech and freedom of others.
Re-inventing npmjs.com
No, it's not even an agent. It's simply a contact god knows what for (for receiving documents they claim), like it can help in the case first person in question doesn't want to be contacted. Basically it duplicates legal address functionality, and even given that I was successfully contacted by email when Estonian tax or statistics board wanted me to correct reporting mistakes.
Not really. It's common to support animal rights while despising humans. This is especially true amongst those who subscribe to the more fringe animal activism groups that as an example free animals used for medical or cosmetic testing from their 'evil human captors'.
Same way school shooters justify it to themselves.
> This is absolutely a "no-win" situation in my mind.

We'll, people can just understand the algorithms are flawed and not blame the advertisers for having an ad for toilet paper next to an video of someone TPing a house.
It hip to talk about the "systematic" nature of Bad Things, but it's very rare for people to actually consider the systems at play. Nobody bothers pushing past inventing a just-so mental state of the actor and looking at the tools they use.

I like your post, you're looking for the bigger picture.
The words "demonetize" and "demonize" look remarkably similar.
Do you actually want to manage a home server? I mean it’s fun and all, but maintaining it is time consuming. Personally I’d rather give some money to AWS and forget about it.

But if you must, any desktop PC will do - just make sure you have reliable storage, multiple SSDs in RAID 1 (or similar that allows multiple disks to die).

A laptop would work but you’ve got the issue of having a single disk (an external one over USB doesn’t cut it) as well as unreliable components - it might die after running 24/7 for a few months, most likely due to bad thermal design.

You’ll also need to have a decent network connection, with IPv6 and a separate IPv4 for the server so it can be reached from the outside without any NAT nonsense, and potentially an UPS so a power cut doesn’t make all your services unavailable and potentially corrupt your data.
While they're not directly responsible, the problem was entirely of their making. They created a whole new profession (even my 8-year-old son wants to grow up to be a "professional youtubber") and then arbitrarily destroy careers.

The created an environment where people could work hard to create their own destiny while giving themselves the ability to destroy those destinies without cause or recourse.

It was only a matter of time until one of those furious victims took up a gun to get revenge.
21st century reporters or "journalists" as they like to be called seem to be the equivalent of schoolyard tattletales.

The death of traditional media and "news" cannot happen soon enough.
Why do you think restaurant servers shouldn't pay taxes? Are there any other occupations for which you believe should be exempt from taxes?
>the man in the middle is blocking it.

Slightly off topic but PayPal doesn't just block it, it seizes the funds entirely for a long period of time. In any case, you're right, YouTube not advertising on videos is not at all like PayPal stealing payments.
PhDs, Blogging and Procrastination
Yes, and the crazy people are the ones who, when desperate and angry, try to kill 3 innocent people and then themselves.

I don't understand the equivocation here. It seems a symptom of the broad inability in modern social thinking to pin any responsibility on individuals. While this stems from our desire to root out systematic issues, which is necessary and important, it should not be the only thing we care about.

In fact, a culture of individual responsibility actually can become a deep feature of our society if we take the time to engender it.

Talking about individual responsibility is not ignoring the systematic issues in society, because a lack of focus on individual responsibility is actually rooted in our culture and hence is a systemic issue in itself.
Sorry but this is ridiculous. Someone decided that to respond to having video de-monetized on a website was justification for trying to kill people. How on earth is it reasonable to start down the path of 'well if she had talked to tech support...'

Tier 1 support is now supposed to dissuade lunatics from murdering people? Are we supposed to construct our society around making sure that nothing, nowhere could possibly lead to a lunatic getting upset at some decision that could inconvenience them?
Assuming that a Google Music PO reads this thread:

--Spotify's ML features are way way way way way way better than Googles
--Everybody else uses Spotify, which means I can share it

The latter is obviously the thing Google won't win, so shouldn't try
With 50 million channels it's impossible to give quality communication to everyone, so they prioritize based on size/viewership/ad dollars. Top creators have great communications channels - nobody's don't. It's not YouTube's responsibility to stroke everyone's fragile ego.

The problem is people thinking they are more important than they are and then going to extreme lengths to make themselves relevant. That's what mass shooters are, people with egos that don't have the influence to match.
Concept UI – Social Media App [Critique This Dribbble Shot]
Absolutely it makes sense. "That person shoot out random youtube employees therefore youtube should change its helpdesk" argument does not make sense. It makes as much sense as caving to any other form of terrorism.

Youtube and its employees are the victim here. Using this to put pressure on them in the "for the safety of your employees" way is incredibly distasteful.
Should people's motives not be inspected simply because they were willing to kill over them? Following that maxim would give us an infantile understanding of human history.
There is sadly a small segment of animal-rights or environmental advocates who let their cause mutate into a sort of misanthropy or disregard for humans. At its mildest levels it manifests as the half-joking comments of "we don't deserve dogs" or "dogs are the best people" that are all the rage on imgur et al., at its more severe levels it becomes anger or violence against those perceived to be enabling oppression of animals seen as pure innocents.
This person videos weren't even strange or fringe...

The attacker videos seemly were mostly about exercising, vegan diet, and some lighthearted videos...

AFTER demonetization, seemly some videos with criticism about Youtube and US, saying that Iran (her home country) had more free speech than US, showed up.
Methods of suicide are strongly culturally determined I believe.

It wouldn't be entirely surprising if the impulse that expressed itself via self-immolation in one cultural context did so via mass shooting culminating in 'suicide-by-cop' in another one (vis, the United States.)
> "The night before Nasim Aghdam opened fire in a courtyard at YouTube's headquarters Tuesday afternoon, Mountain View police found the San Diego woman sleeping in her car.
She had been reported missing by her family in Southern California, and her father Ismail Aghdam told police she might be going to YouTube because she 'hated' the company. Police called the family at 2 a.m. Tuesday to say she'd been found and that everything was 'under control,' her father said."

The most noteworthy part of the article to me, granted that this excerpt is taken from a different San Jose news source.

Could this have been prevented? Should the father's comments have been enough reasonable suspicion to arrest her, or at least search her for firearms and confiscate them, given her threat level to society?

Edit: The replies do offer good points, so thank you! I'm personally a supporter of the Second Amendment as well; it's just heartbreaking, especially if any of the victims die, to know just how close we were to stopping it.
I remember that Blizzard had secretly watermarked WoW screenshots.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4505584
Where has it been described that the woman was suffering from mental illness? That seems like a retroactive label.
And there is probably less snow when the thaw begins, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_well
One of the most basic rights people have in America is the right to protest. You're attempting to rebrand protesting as mob censorship.
> as long as we have legit voting

Not really, no. It's frequently gerrymandered and considerable effort is put into making it harder for some people to vote than others. The count is probably legitimate, except where questionable machine voting systems are in place.
Zero width characters have legitimate uses such as family emojis and certain Indic scripts. You don't want to break these.
I'm not talking about the fundamentally misguided memory-distributed computing stuff, I mean "improve flexibility enough that you can bolt some additional units on as offload" (address translation in this case would take some work though). The magic of presenting software with a more or less monolithic core in this case is that you don't have that problem, since you can simply do it the usual way.

Also, I don't think the trouble with added complexity out of the hot path is any added latency, it's that they're needlessly burning up the thermal budget. Not that raising the voltage is the best way of increasing frequency, but it's sure to do so.
>It was only a matter of time until one of those furious victims took up a gun to get revenge.

[citation needed, God help us all]
'De-Monetized' suggests that someone who produces a video has an automatic right to income. That's bonkers, it's already quite a service that Youtube allows you to upload your videos to reach an audience that you'd be hard pressed to serve from your own server. They do this for free. In the previous iteration of such platforms all the ad income would go to the owner of the website, not to the rights owners of the videos.

The company then decided to cut the producers of the content in on the advertising income. Some of those have apparently taken this to mean that they have an inalienable right to this income, to the point where they will take out their entitlement complexes on the employees of the company.

The terms of service are pretty clear about all this too.

If you want control over your content and you want to get all the advertising income associated with your content set up your own bloody server and leave youtube and it's employees alone.

On another note: I hate fanatics, no matter of what plumage.

Edit: And I hate their apologists as well.
We're spending a lot of money finalizing our GPDR implementation right now. I wouldn't know how to not extend it globally. That would be significant additional work at this point.
This is directly form the movie "S1m0ne".
What an uninspired artist :(
It's interesting how algorithmic the process of fabricating ( real or fake ) news has become.
So one should be careful in interpreting the term animal rights. In the past, animal rights activists have burned down houses of medical researchers.
They'll be shocked when they realize we too are animals.