skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Sure, DS is vile, but at the point we start enforcing censorship on a whim instead of hardened policies that aren't selectively enforced, I think it becomes worrisome.

This is a mistake; but don't worry, it's a common mistake. The mistake is to assume that human-constructed ontologies are actually capable of describing the real world, and thus that we can come up with laws or rules that CAN be assiduously (and not selectively) enforced.

This is simply wrong; laws are human constructions made up of language, an imperfect instrument that has no power by itself. There is NO WAY to apply laws without interpretation by the enforcer. It is up to some set of people we designate as agents of the law to decide what the application is.

The same is true of any rule-based system, legal or extra-legal. The rule set by itself can only provide a guide; it requires human judgement to make the rule set work in a particular scenario. Cf. Potter Stewart's famous pronouncement about obscenity:
>I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

Since it requires judgement to apply the abstract rule to the particular situation, it means enforcement, by its very nature, must be "selective", and there must always be an arbitrary element to it. That is, judgement, being produced by individuals with their own biases and history which they must necessarily bring to bear on the question, is always questionable.

We have mechanisms to mitigate this problem - mostly precedent and review, i.e., amortizing the problem of individual judgement over several individuals to smooth out the bumps, and recall - the ability to reject individual enforcers. But again, these mechanisms are imperfect (who watches the watchmen, and what makes those watchers any more credible, by the way?).

What's my fucking point? It's that when we begin on this quest, we should recognize our fundamental limit: we CANNOT produce an ideal solution, we are limited by metaphysics itself (the world is larger than we have words to describe). It behooves us to see, then, that the solutions we DO arrive at must be full of compromise, and must recognize all of the ways in which our system is subject to failure.

Your post, then, is a good step along this way. If what we are doing becomes worrisome, good - that worry is a check on whatever authority we have put in place, and your subjective judgements being brought to bear are a way to control the arbitrariness of authority.

But, at the end of the day, all we can really do is worry harder, speak louder, and shape and reshape our institutions, constantly trying to get them to fit the - ever-shifting - landscape of our morality.

See also: Richard Rorty, who was very fond of observing that human society is made up of ugly half-compromises.
> And at some point, that means it becomes virtually impossible to express yourself if your views are unpopular enough.

This is how free speech has always worked, though. You could always get on a soapbox in a public plaza and rant, but the potential engaged audience there is pretty small.

If you wanted a real audience, even in older times you would've needed a newspaper to print your thoughts, or a publisher to help with your books.

"Few people will be listening to highly unpopular messages" hardly seems like something to get in a tiff over, if it's just the result of the free market of ideas.
Yes, I won’t make any claim whether or not this guy is a Nazi. I have no idea.
Checks themselves require the banks to act as intermediates. I don't know if banks would be allowed to deplatform someone in the same manner as patreon.
A good start:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_Stat...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_United_States
Most younger people (< 30 years old) already do this anyway and refuse to answer phone calls from numbers that are not already in their contact list. I know I do and I'm not young anymore.
In American movies, I'll sometimes you'll hear "Mr. and Mrs. John Smith" when introducing a couple at an extremely formal event where everyone wears tuxedos and such. I've never been to such an event before, so I don't know how accurate that is. But it's definitely something odd I've noticed in movies.
He used slurs, that's for certain. But it's critical to point out that the context in which they were used was to tell the Alt Right that they're behaving exactly like they see the groups they despise (blacks, Jewish people, gays etc.) through their bigoted worldview. Not to mention, your excerpt cuts off a crucial part of what he said. As other commenters pointed out, the whole part of this was:

> It's not about, like, actually doing any good, it's about getting attention. And I see, like, 'kikes are ruining everything'. [laughs] Good—good—good job. Should tackle field [I can't understand this sentence]. You're making your movement look like you're not full of Nazis! Great! Bravo!"

In case the context isn't clear, saying that they "look like you're not full of Nazi" is sarcasm. Of course subscription to belief in a global Jewish conspiracy makes a group look like they're full of Nazis.

It is difficult to claim that these statements were meant as an attack on blacks and Jewish people themselves. It's pretty obvious that this banning was carried out for ideological reasons. In the past, Jack Conte stated that Patreon would only ban people for speech that was spread on their platform.[1] This was flat out ignored. It looks like much of their userbase is calling them out on the questionable justifications for the banning, too.[2]

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofpbDgCj9rw

2. See comments on https://patreonhq.com/hate-speech-on-patreon-a9026e52c2cf

Edit: changed "they're behaving exactly like the groups they despise" to "they're behaving exactly like they see the groups they despise through their bigoted worldview". Crucial mis-wording on my part, as the original version made it look I was saying said groups really do behave like how the alt-right claims.
We had decades of lazy game developers not using more than one core and CPUs kept up with the demands of those game developers. Consider that games are one of the most performance sensitive an average user is going to come in contact with then how on earth are you going to find a single inherently sequential problem that is enough to saturate an entire CPU core when even games, which consist of thousands of divisible sub-problems and therefore are easily parallelizable, were fine with just a single one?

I can think of hundreds of inherently sequential algorithms we are using daily but nevertheless use an insignificant amount of CPU time.

Let's take binary tree traversal. Assuming a 100ns access penalty for every pointer this means we'd need a binary tree with a depth of 10000000 and this means it would have 2^10000000 elements to saturate a modern CPU core with a single query per second. That's quite a large dataset and I'm sure that even if you converted the entire universe into RAM you could never store that much data.
You are talking about an extreme edge case situation, where the entire world declares crypto to be illegal.

I will agree that in this situation, crypto is probably dead.

The much more likely scenario, though, is that a couple countries try to make crypto illegal, and other countries don't, and the decentralization of crypto makes it very difficult for the attacking country to stop it.

The banning country isn't going to be able to target miners in other countries or take down exchanges that aren't located there.

Crypto is still useful in this much more likely scenario.

Think countries like Venezuela. They don't want people moving money outside the country, and yet people are doing that right now, with crypto, and the Venezuelan government can't stop it.
> You will be hard pressed to find any Electron app that exceeds 200 MB in disk space. Most are ~50 MB.

Huh? Looking at my applications folder right now:

Atom 1.31: 822mb

Daedalus 0.8: 265mb

Mist 0.9.2: 186mb

Neon 0.0.7: 180mb

Patchwork: 185mb

Riot 0.11.4: 160mb

VS Code: 193mb

The electron framework alone is 117mb on MacOS. Honestly, how many copies of that do I need?
But the line cannot become "tinfoil hat types" because that is a completely undefinable measure. People who correctly predicted the 2008 financial crisis were considered "tinfoil hat types". Should they have been dropped off these platforms because they sounded crazy at the time?
Merkle Trees – Ensuring Integrity on Blockchains
I agree it is the worst.
I mean, bitcoin is a thing.
pdtar was another name for gnu tar as can be seen on john's home page or wikipedia page if you can't access it.
Experience has been awesome. This tech is really challenging for me, but at the same time amount of knowledge I gain is huge. Deno community hangs around on gitter, here: https://gitter.im/denolife/Lobby

Question about contributions has been raised on gitter several times already and the answer was to look for "good first issue" labels in GitHub repo. However there are not many of them right now.
But then you're trading money for morality directly. For most businesses, customers are to some extent fungible, so you can afford to be a little picky if you're careful about the health of your company.
Yep, see another comment by me down thread.
Ask HN: Best way to browse HN on iOS?
I've been looking for some neat app on iOS some time ago, but sticked to the website. Do you have any recommendations?
How to Be Futuristic – Bruce Sterling
And tomorrow the line will be don't be Republican.

People will not take this lying down.
Everything about your response I agree with except the tongue-in-cheek “these individuals are free to create their own businesses and websites which facilitate whatever kind of discourse they please, nobody can take that away from them...”

The reality is no, there is enough privatized centralization in payment and networks that certain companies can choose not to do business with someone, based on otherwise legal speech, and effectively stifle that speech.

Maybe that’s better than the alternative, which is that companies are forced to carry speech they don’t agree with or even find “repulsive”.

However there is a concept of “public forum” and at some point it is incumbent on private enterprises controlling key internet infrastructure like DNS, IP allocation, peering, DDoS, and even payments at some point, to become neutral carriers which cannot and should not interfere with providing services based on content.

This to me is an even more fundamental neutrality than what is referred to as “network neutrality” because we’re talking about blocking service entirely not just prioritizing packets for higher paying customers.

This is a critical stance to take now, not 10 years from now after the frog is boiled. I think the average entitled American has absolutely no clue how quickly a regime can become repressive, and how much repression is going on out there. We tip toe around talking about Daily Stormer when countries today are inspecting packets to cart people off to new age gulags.

Nazis are a pathetic boogeyman to justify this kind of censorship. Laying this kind of groundwork to kick out a “radical anti-feminist” I personally hope that Patreon users rebel against that.
> only reinforces the original claim

It didn't though, the "Mme" part stands for mademoiselle, indicating it is a woman. Therefore they weren't pretending to be a man for the purpose of getting a paper published.
It's so hard to trust anything these days, much less the SPLC...

> Mike Peinovich, hosted a poll asking users who their biggest influence was in coming to the alt-right. Multiple respondents named Sargon of Akkad.

I can't find the actual poll in question, but from the SPLC's own analysis, Sargon was mentioned a grand total of 3 times in a thread about what brought people to "the movement" on The Right Stuff forum. I guess that counts as "multiple". Regardless it was a very small sample size collected from an explicitly white nationalist (I assume, I'm just taking SPLC's word for that one) message board. Likely most of the people who still follow Sargon have not gone down the racist rabbit hole and just consider themselves skeptics, but hey they found 3 so...

But this part is downright slanderous, or liable (not sure which, need to watch the Spiderman movie again...)

> And for someone who says he’s not a part of the alt-right, he’s been spending a lot of time with them lately. He’s appeared in videos with alt-right figures like Millennial Woes and Richard Spencer, giving those men a platform to reach his nearly 800,000 subscribers in the process.

While factually true the implication is clearly that he appeared with these figures to promote their ideas, not debate them, which is what actually happened. When paired with Spencer Sargon so vehemently disagreed with him that he kinda made a fool of himself, as at least Spencer remained calm throughout.

I don't really care to defend Sargon and don't watch/listen to most of any of the content he produces. I do follow the tea leaves though, and from what I've gathered, while certainly anti-PC/feminist/social justice/progressive etc., he's no racist.

I mean I could be wrong because as I said I've not listened to much of him, but I'm certainly not going to take the SPLC's word for it.
I have to disagree. From where I stand, complexity of C++ merely reflects that of practice of programming in general (modulo the language's historical origin and evolution). C++ remains a pragmatic language that helps solving practical problems. Memory management is one aspect, and the RAII paradigm and smart pointers are an excellent way to go about it; garbage collection libraries are also available.
I went the other way, started writing C++ in 95 and digging into C properly around 2005.

Just make sure that the cure isn't worse than the disease. It's all to easy to slip into identifying with C++ because of the substantial effort it takes to master.

Should you, like me and many others; eventually find yourself spending more time and effort on taming C++, don't hesitate to let go. It's a tool.
> For example the homicide rate in Japan is much lower than in Jamaica; from this it follows that Jamaicans are on average more homicidal than Japanese. That's a negative generalisation. It's also true.

That is not true. The fact you presented might be true, but the statement that "Jamaicans are on average more homicidal than Japanese" is not identical to the fact about homicide rates.

Your statement implies that those two groups of people are somehow differing in temperament such that one has more violent tendencies than the other.

The reality is that there are many complicating factors, and your statement removes enough of those that it no longer is true.

For example, a similar but more obviously false statement from the same vein: "It is a fact that americans have more total car accidents than the ancient greeks. Therefore, the americans are worse drivers than the ancient greeks" (or similarly "more americans own cars and have no accidents than ancient greeks, so it follows americans are better drivers). The obvious confounding factor there is the fact that ancient greece had no cars, but it follows an identical pattern to your statement. It starts with a simple fact, and then creates a phrase which neatly avoids all confounding factors and has a negative implication that relates to the fact, but ignores how complex reality is.

I think that if you, in seriousness, made a statement like your example, you can and should be banned from platforms. You're mis-using facts to represent one culture as more violent than another, and implying that it's a trait of the people, not a much more complicated result of economic and legal differences. It's an incredibly racist and insidious thing to say.
> I don’t think he was naive in saying what he said and neither do I think he was being charitable to blacks or to whites for that matter.

No, you're being too naive when you're so charitable to assume that a Brit, of his background and who does what he does for a living, isn't aware of the stigma of the n-word.
I don't have knowledge about early NPM stages, but from my perspective the goal right now is to get rid of need for package manager.
> Also, for the record, I'm a feminist, left-leaning socialist. So good luck writing me off as another conservative windbag who doesn't understand the first amendment that's crowing about censorship.

Well, that's all well and good; but I do notice that on Hacker News there is a very strong tendency to only report and discuss this kind of thing when it affects "conservative windbags" or people with terrible long-discredited ideas or campaigns against individual women.

It's also well worth discussion "stochastic terrorism", the phenomenon by which injecting hate material into public discussion will eventually cause someone to take it seriously. If you say "carthago delenda est" often enough someone will carry out a mass shooting in Carthage.
I think the Nazis finished like that too, didn't they? The genocide was a secret. Certainly not "open" anyway.
Let me rephrase that: You see a lot of calling-out of reprehensible behavior perpetrated by white men.

That's a good thing, that kind of stuff should be called out.
I would love to be able to block all numbers coming from my area code and the first 3 digits of my number.. all my robo calls come from a number that looks just like mine.
Almost, copy-paste compatibility with C89 hinders its safety.

However it is better than keeping with plain old C.
Let's throw everything out of the window and start from scratch. The JavaScript way of doing things is why I don't like to invest much in this ecosystem.
I turned off the feature that shows calls on my MacBook because of this. It's nice that the UI shows "Scam Likely" as the caller, but maybe give me an option to filter out those calls entirely? Let them go to voicemail or something... who is answering the phone when the caller is unknown and identified by the UI as "Scam Likely"?
Just in case - you can turn this option off.
Automatically reply to emails using Artificial Intelligence
I'd note that television viewing statistics are also likely inflated, at least for a normal person's definition of "watching TV". How often have you been in front of a TV in a bar or airport, but no one is actually watching?

TV viewing in bars and other public locations is specifically excluded from TV viewing numbers. The same is true for hospitals, asylums, prisons, nursing homes, and even college dormitories.

Also, the way it works is that the broadcast only gets counted as viewed if someone watches for 300 continuous seconds. And then credit is only given for the 15-minute block (:00-:15, :15-:30, :30-:45, :45-:00) in which that 300 second span happened. And if the 300-seconds spans a 15-minute boundary, then it doesn't count at all.

For example, if someone watches a TV program from 6:01pm until 6:07pm, the broadcaster gets credit for 6:00pm-6:15pm.

If someone watches from 6:11pm-6:19pm, it doesn't count at all.

I'm not sure why this is defined as "300 seconds" and not "five minutes." When I was in broadcasting, I used the phrase "five minutes" twice and was harshly corrected by my bosses both times, so there must be a reason.
Banana Pi 24-Core ARM Server Spied Running Ubuntu 18.04 – HotHardware
Cost of 51% attacks on various coins: https://www.crypto51.app/
Nor does the "blame the robots" thesis explain 2017.
Can we all just come together and agree that this headline is frustratingly ambiguous? Was "inciting revolt" in the litany of Benjamin's alleged crimes? Or did Patreon's action incite a revolt? I need to know!!

Or maybe this is intentional, and the NYT knows how to make me click. You can never be too paranoid about this stuff.
I am still amazed these useless startups employ that many people (after layoffs), considering they have no useful product or service.

At least in theory, through Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, they would enable permissionless trade and payments but that's explicitly impossible as all customers are KYC'd to death. There's literally nothing useful being done, no value being addded.
> should we get rid of net neutrality because Comcast ought to have the right to decide what content goes over its pipes?

Not only should we not get rid of net neutrality, we should enshrine it as a principle further up the protocol stack.
Indeed, which points out another UI problem: as far as I can tell there's no way to link the Mac/ipad calling to your phone (so it'll use the phone network to make a call) without enabling ringing on incoming calls. Thus I simply disabled this otherwise quite useful feature.
Excerpt: "Ford, whose electrical engineers couldn’t solve some problems they were having with a gigantic generator, called Steinmetz in to the plant. Upon arriving, Steinmetz rejected all assistance and asked only for a notebook, pencil and cot. According to Scott, Steinmetz listened to the generator and scribbled computations on the notepad for two straight days and nights. On the second night, he asked for a ladder, climbed up the generator and made a chalk mark on its side. Then he told Ford’s skeptical engineers to remove a plate at the mark and replace sixteen windings from the field coil. They did, and the generator performed to perfection.

Henry Ford was thrilled until he got an invoice from General Electric in the amount of $10,000.

Ford acknowledged Steinmetz’s success but balked at the figure. He asked for an itemized bill.

Steinmetz, Scott wrote, responded personally to Ford’s request with the following:

Making chalk mark on generator $1.

Knowing where to make mark $9,999."
All of you have a mean pedantry going on.
I have no idea what a robocall is but I would LOVE a simple notification banner for when someone calls. I rarely get calls these days but when I do, it’s a major annoyance if I’m doing something on my phone. It’s time calls are relegated to the same level of urgency as WhatsApp messages and emails.
It's like the difference between Sam's Club and a typical grocer. The grocer offers services to the public, Sam's Club does not. It is members only. And it can have any requirements it pleases for membership. It doesn't have any racial exclusivity policies, but that would be well within their rights if they did. (For instance, country clubs have often had racial exclusivity clauses, even after the civil rights act.) Sam's Club is not a company for the public.

When you need consideration for membership, there really is just no way you can claim that to be non-private. That includes Patreon, it's private. It's their rules. Full stop. It's like adwords, if you want to use it, you have to start giving Google more consideration. Normally to use the public parts of Google, you don't need to give any consideration at all. (Of course, Google takes the tracking information from you anyway with their public facing services, but they don't ask you to actively give them any consideration.)
Theres a fine line between “being allowed to throw a loud ranting racist out of a pub” because the pub is your business and you should be allowed to choose who to do business with and you don’t like racists... and throwing out a person of a different race because it’s your business and you should be allowed to choose who to do business with and don’t like that race...

That is, we want businesses to have the right to choose who to do business with, unless we disagree with their reasons for not wanting to do business with someone.
AFAIK, it's still the case that I can't block everything but numbers in my contacts, right? That's all I'm asking, and it can't be that hard. Add that simple feature that should have been there ten years ago and the problem is solved for me.
There’s a free app called Hiya that does this
Certainly the native OS should support this. But I n case you are not aware, third party apps such as Hiya will do this exact thing.