skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Isn’t this all predicated on a manifesto that surfaced before the dust even settled? Also saw reports the manifesto was a hoax. Everyone needs to slow the hell down.
Isn’t the concern about the gradual radicalization that occurs in these online communities, and not about specific posts that threaten violence or announce impending mass shootings?
I think this is the reason (from TFA):

>The site remained on the fringes until 2014, when some supporters of GamerGate — a loose reactionary collection of anti-feminist video gamers — flocked to 8chan after being kicked off 4chan. Since GamerGate, 8chan has become a catchall website for internet-based communities whose behavior gets them evicted from more mainstream sites.
> Now it's mainly from HN. But either way, I'd need perhaps 20-40 subscriptions.

No, you should be paying one subscription, to HN, which should be making arrangements with the news sources. Paying for subscriptions from the sources when HN is your gateway is like readers directly subscribing to wire services when they get their news by opening up a newspaper.

The old media “portals” have been displaced and become sources consumed through other portals, but business models haven't fully adapted.
But you can't deny a business (whether it's a platform or a publisher) the right to choose not to enable bad actors
Has it occurred to you that radicalization actually happens offline, perhaps even in childhood, due to some kind of real life events, and nothing to do with internet at all?

All of this rooted in meatspace. The so called "social defeat".

How often do you see successful people that have a fullfilling life go on rampages?
I googled that...

The first company founded to provide software products and services was Computer Usage Company in 1955.

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

Download the referenced article about CUC, Recollections of the First Software Company here:

http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/10.1109%2F85.279238
Make money with these crypto-based alternatives to Reddit
> To my knowledge, no one thinks this is because rich kids come from better genetic stock (you'd be amazed how many experiments and studies change when you control for income levels).

They do, they're just polite about it because no one wants to put it that way. However, this is just Herrnstein's syllogism in action: if intelligence/education are heritable, education leads to higher incomes, then higher income families will have higher genetic potential which is passed onto kids (especially with the existing high levels of assortative mating on education). And this is precisely what we see with polygenic scores: there certainly are class differences in means.
>In other words, if anyone is aiming for notoriety, shooting up people in Seoul or Tokyo will give you an eternal place in national zeitgeist, while in America you will be famous until the next shooting: A few months? Weeks?

Good luck buying guns in Korea/Japan (or any country[1] for that matter) as a tourist, or smuggling them in. It's significantly easier to get guns where you normally reside.

[1] Except maybe the US. Is the gunshow exemption still around?
AI in HR
FBI's Phoenix field office in May of this year, published a memo that asserts and discusses "anti-government, identity base, and fringe political conspiracy theories very likely motivate some domestic extremists to commit criminal or violent activity"

And in its appendix it lists QAnon as one such fringe political conspiracy theories.

https://www.scribd.com/document/420379775/FBI-Conspiracy-The...

(page 8)

So what's Twitter going to do when people tweet or retweet anti-government, identity based, fringe conspiracy theories or theorists, given the FBI considers at the very least that such things are very likely to motivate domestic terrorism? And are only heads of state going to be allowed to do that?

Q and movement followers, having moved to 8chan because 4chan was compromised, surely will consider the FBI memo, Cloudfare's decision, just move evidence of "deep state" fighting back. In the outlook section of the FBI report, it expects these conspiracy theories to spread, and foster more violence, leading up to the 2020 election.

There are other groups listed in the FBI report. 8chan isn't one of them. But the FBI field office in Nevada issued a search warrant for 8chan in Reno regarding the Poway Synagogue shooting.
I think it would be fitting if 8chan moved to radwareddoscloud.com which is the NRA's cloud protection service.
There's very interesting psychology research on the topic of radicalization as well as de-radicalization that could come in handy. As well as similar techniques in cult exit counseling.
This is a strong feeling you have, but I see no evidence for it. The media likes to talk more about ultra nationalist groups now than it did in the past, giving some sense that it's growing into a big problem, but where is the actual evidence. Seems more like a big narrative push, a puff of smoke in everyone's eyes.

By many studies Americans overall are far less racist and more tolerant than they ever were. Things are actually improving on that front rather than deteriorating.
The FBI tracks homicides by firearms. You are incorrect.
When you use the tired, old "businesses can refuse to serve anybody they want" argument, understand that you are using the same arguments used in the past to refuse business to various races, creeds, orientations etc. that are now protected classes. That really ought to make you queasy and perhaps you should contemplate why.

By the way, some states are now recognizing that political affiliation needs to be a protected class as well: https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/political-aff.... It may not be in keeping with modern progressive thought but is certainly in the spirit of classical liberalism as well as an important first step in depolarizing the country.
How do you define a "mental check"?

"socially awkward people aren't allowed to have guns" as a policy would be a flagrant violation of a constitutional right.

The scary thing is that mentally ill people can intentionally mask their illness in order to pass exams.
It's worth pointing out that the House passed the "Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019" back in February, and that Republican leadership in the Senate refuses to bring it to a vote. I have not heard of any House representatives facing enormous backlash at home over their vote.

As it is, the House is more representative of the population of the US than the Senate, so it's fair to say the biggest barrier to increased gun control right now is the quirky nature of the US political system, not popular sentiment.
Just be careful around Solaris!
Sure, but the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 "killed at least 168 people, [and] injured more than 680 others".[0] And annual traffic deaths were 50K-35K during the 90s through the 01s.[1]

0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_traffic_deaths_per_VMT...
Given:

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2019/08/04/the-el-p...

I believe Cloudflare's action is necessary to try to stem the tide here. Sometimes ... just sometimes the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many.
What's your diagnosis?
Not sure how that system works in particular, but if you have the keys, can't you just crack the DRM?
Shame they didn't show their love of the word no during WWII
Is this something you've always done or only something you've done as you've gained higher level positions? I'm imagining that compensation is always at some minimum satisfactory level as well (and it must be rather high unless you're wealthy or bought a home decades ago or live in some really LCOL area?). Do you only work at places that you truly want to work at from the get go?

I can't imagine implementing this at an IC level at a startup. (Which is where I've been mostly) I could see it at some places where you could switch teams in a big company and not deal with those same people again. (thus not having to reinterview fully) I've found that people will change their ways very rarely unless your loss would ruin them. They're much happier to lose ICs than change.
Please read: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2019/08/04/the-el-p...
> Civilian kills police officer = boring, wrong narrative; no report

You're kidding, right?

Cops getting doused in water got national news coverage.

So'd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_killings_of_NYPD_officers
Interesting. Why not use Clojure which runs on the JVM?
Brandenburg v. Ohio is interesting. Technically doesn't it mean that any speech that calls for action against existing law loses protection from First Amendment? I'm sure SC judges will make sane decisions for now but doesn't this door wide open for this possibility? Given most speech needing First Amendment protection is against some law, this SC decision feels very troublesome to me. Especially now that SC judges are appointed strictly to align with government, Brandenburg v. Ohio can be used for any speech against government to be deemed outside of first amendment protection. No?
OK, but where does it stop now?
What about communists, anarchists, marxists, mormons, people who believe there are genetically based cognitive differences based on sex/race. What about people who are against abortion, against weed legalization, what about people who consider cops to be a civilian death squad used by the rich to oppress the poor. What about people who think the US Army is an occupation force in every place but America. Is OK to discriminate some of them? All of them? None? Are you going to manage the API so the apps can be built to see who is worthy or not?
That is not currently how the DOI infrastructure works at all.

Individual entities register DOIs, and decide where they redirect (and can change the resolution at any time). In these cases, the publisher (such as Elsevier) is the one who has registered the DOI, and they get to decide where it redirects/resolves. They also paid for the DOIs.

There are actually a (small-ish) number of DOI registrars. The largest, and most likely by far to be used for scholarly articles, is CrossRef.

Neither CrossRef nor the DOI foundation have the authority to change where a DOI resolves to, against the wishes of the DOI registrant. (It would be like a DNS registrar or the IANA deciding news.ycombinator.com should resolve somewhere other than Y Combinator wants it to -- indeed DOI works pretty analogously to DNS, probably intentionally by inspiration).

What you propose would require major changes to the social and business setup of DOI. Probably to the business/sustainability model too, because a registrant would probably be less excited to pay for a DOI they don't actually get to control the resolution of. (CrossRef and the International DOI Foundation are both non-profits. They still need to pay for their operations, and the DOI infrastructure. That is currently funded by charging registrants for DOIs). It would also require some kind of "regulatory regime" to determine who has the authority on what basis to determine where a DOI resolves (and those 'regulators' would probably increase expenses, which you need a new plan for funding), compared to the current situation where whatever entity registered a DOI decides where it resolves to (similar to DNS).
A big issue is that we are seeing enthusiasm for censorship. So I hope that people will do some research into the history and current use of censorship.

The other difficult problem is that people think that their country is an exception to all other countries and history with regards to censorship and everything else.

One other issue: corporations that have as much or more centralized power as governments. In line with the rest of my comment, one reason this is problematic is because it is much easier for governments to assert control over individual companies. And those policies (sometimes good or sometimes very bad) affect masses of people.

It really seems to me that we are moving towards a more homogeneous global political system that honestly appears to be modeled after the Chinese one and will probably be controlled from there.
Maybe you should subscribe to a newspaper or two because otherwise this is what you get -- news that people click on.

I wish people would stop blaming the news and blame themselves.
neals clearly said "50% loss of electricity when transporting" which has nothing to do with intermittent generation and need for storage. He claims to be an operator of electric charging and hydrogen fueling networks, and I was hoping to learn something from his experience, but that unqualified statement undermines his position entirely.
> forgetting which political party in the US has the closest ties with big business

Which one are you thinking of?
I usually ask the questions differently:

"Is it worth being paid $X to work here?"
"What is the likelihood I'll be paid $X elsewhere"

And if they're paying a lot of money, I can tolerate the crappy working conditions -- I first heard of this a couple decades ago as "crying all the way to the bank."

A CEO that comes in to fix a company has a similar question. "It's going to be a nightmare to turn this company around, is the pay worth it?"
https://thedailyshitter.com/getting-rid-of-those-pesky-mosqu...
As bad as the content on 8chan is, it is deeply distressing how Cloudflare has attached itself to the internet as what amounts to a mafia organization collecting protection money. Almost all the non-deep web tools to abuse sites are behind Cloudflare. They really are playing both sides to create a necessary business. I have other theories about them being the most efficient NSA collection site to exist due to TLS MITM and their horrifically insecure 'flexible SSL' but those theories remain unsubstantiated until the next Snowden.
Isn't banning/silencing communities like these the real radicalization?
Free speech is a cultural value. It sometimes manifests itself in the form of codified laws like the first amendment to the US Constitution. However, free speech is not limited to the USA.

The idea behind free speech is that people are allowed to put forward new ideas ( especially ideas about how to organize society, what is good and moral etc ) so that people can consider and accept or reject them. The idea is that no entity has a monopoly on truth and if you want to propagate your ideas, make your arguments persuasive and refute your opponents' arguments.

Free speech is ultimately a bet on human capacity for reason and goodness. The idea is that good ideas should win adherents and bubble to the top while bad ideas sink to the bottom as they lose followers.

Sometimes, governments are the most powerful enemy of free speech while sometimes other entities can be.

I am not saying free speech is a good thing, but there is no "exclusive to government" limiting principle to free speech.
I think a point of contention over the unmoderated aspect is that compared to it's sister site 4chan which will actively coordinate with authorities and temporarily take the site down whenever evidence is being collected, 8chan appears to treat the authorities with contempt to the point of needing a search warrant. It's creator Fredrick calling for the site's shutdown was the killing strike in my opinion, though the site had /g/ establish a full Tor infrastructure years ago so it's not going to really truly die anytime soon

Speaking of 4chan if I was Hiro right now I would be batting down the hatches and moving most of the moderation force to the problem boards to snipe any incoherent manifestos until this all blows over.
Then it is in our rational self-interest to be angry at them, so what is the relevance of your point?
or in this case...hours. :sigh:
> It seems like most of the outrageous incitement to violence people have posted on 8chan would be illegal under Brandenburg v. Ohio

And yet, no one wants to police that. So... Cloudflare did it themselves.

I mean, look, I get the principled point you're making, but it's on really shaky ground. Either the conduct on that site was garbage that should be removed or it wasn't. And if it was... well, good riddance.

After the third (third!) mass murder advertised on the site, I think the time for principled and careful consideration has passed. Shut the garbage down, then we'll figure out if there's a better way to police this stuff going forward.
To extend your metaphor, imagine that part of humanity's brain is engaged in thinking about the abduction and exploitation of children. Another part is lionizing mass murderers and advocating for copy cats. A different part of the brain is contemplating the state of the art for financial and cyber crimes etc.

If you come to believe that the time humanity's brain spends occupied with these pursuits leads to negative real world consequences then I don't think the argument you've presented is very compelling. Put another way, if I were someone's therapist and my patient confided in me that, the more time he spends thinking about shooting up his school, the more he feels like actually doing it - I might advise him to spend less time thinking about shooting up the school. If I had the power, I might forbid him from thinking about it at all.

Really, what, but the amusement of edgy people, does humanity gain from entertaining these dark conversations? Perhaps such conversations play a role in the detection or prevention of bad outcomes. For example, police detectives are sometimes taught to identify with the criminal to understand their behavior, and so maybe having access to dark thoughts would help in that regard.

To me, the question of moderation hinges on whether you think permitting speech will be, on net, positive or negative. I don't have data or solid evidence - but I do have intuitions.
> Brandenburg v. Ohio is interesting. Technically doesn't it mean that any speech that calls for action against existing law loses protection from First Amendment?

No. From the Wikipedia description of the case, “The U.S. Supreme Court reversed Brandenburg's conviction, holding that government cannot constitutionally punish abstract advocacy of force or law violation.“

The entire point of the ruling was that the government cannot punish someone for merely advocating against the law. And even dangerous speech is okay if it’s not likely to be acted on. “free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”
This is a reasonable move for cloudflare. I can see how keep hosting this website will bring it trouble in the future.
I'm a foreigner living in Tokyo, it's just supply and demand. Lots of people want to live in the city so inevitably a decent-sized apartment gets pricey.
Some of what you are talking about is really more about politeness than high and low context cultures. There is certainly a connection but high context has more emphasis on the sort of "it isn't what you say but how you say it" kind of meaning. High and low context are just extremes and most cultures are somewhere in between. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context...
Political ideology has a higher heritability than homosexuality.

It's a myth that people can simply "choose their ideology"
Your premise is wrong. Mass shootings and killings happen across the globe at rates comparable to America. America is exceptional only in its population, which obviously increases the number of events without increasing their prevalence, and in its proximity to you personally, which increases how much you hear about American events versus other events.

Even Polifact has fact-checked this and found that America is not particularly exceptional [0]. By this study, it's not even in the top 10. [1]

And just off the top of my head, there were two mass killings recently in Japan. A guy burned down an animation studio and killed 35 people. Before that, a guy stabbed a bunch of kids to death near a subway station in Tokyo a few months ago.

[0] https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jun...

[1a] https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/sorry-despite-...

[1b] https://crimeresearch.org/2015/06/comparing-death-rates-from...
Power and water companies operate as public utilities for a reason. Cloudflare is not a public utility, nor should they be.

Banks can absolutely decide not to do business you, for any reason that's not explicitly forbidden (protected classes, etc.)
> Telecom companies like AT&T aren't providing "essential service".

...according to Title II, yes, they absolutely are.

https://newnetworks.com/titleii/
> They shouldn't be deciding whose message they want to carry

Being a messenger doesn't require being amoral.
> Let's hope it is incompetence

Indeed. The scary proposition is that it's competence.
Replying to the other comments under this reply: in Canada we check for past history of mental illness but don’t flag gun license applicants just because of that. They need to have a history of being treated due to illness that could lead to violence.
>Yes the media could adjust how they report it, but that's not the root problem here. It's an intentionally fostered growing domestic nationalist terrorism.

Like any form of lone-wolf terrorism, these shootings are being perpetrated by individuals, with individual motivations. There's a compelling case that they're at least partially motivated or inspired by media coverage.

We often hear that suicide is contagious. Some studies and commentators have suggested that murder-suicide might spread like noncriminal suicide.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/11/americas-...

Columbine shooting reporter Dave Cullen has suggested some low-impact changes to media coverage which could have a positive effect.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/davecullen/stop-naming-mass-shooter...
Certainly the radicalization may happen offline. But in the cases at hand, it did not. There is a significant uptick in violence associated with online radicalization, and no corresponding uptick in violence associated with offline radicalization. You can say that the role of the internet is overblown, but the evidence is there.

Besides, it's a sort of weird position to take on an a) online forum b) of tech people that the internet does not have a significant role in facilitating communication that would not otherwise happen.
> I think you shouldn't be able to start a panic without cause (yelling fire in a crowded theater)

I would argue this isn't speech any more than saying a phrase to Alexa that causes an API to be called which then detonates a bomb is speech.

I define speech as expression of ideas. Basically, say I maintain a blog. Should there be limits on which ideas I'm allowed to express on that blog? Should I be thrown in jail if I express a "bad" idea?
Easy way out literally noone in the US wants or will support:

Get a legal definition of well regulated militia, get it to not map to the national guard or some homebred terrorist group via some ritual like the pledge or whatever, and police the crap out of the gun sales to groups outside this definition.

By the Constitution's own legitimacy it's the government's choice to forego this control under those terms, and it musts be the government's choice to tighten this control up.

Why is it legal for me to own an elephant gun but illegal to strap it to a drone? For this exact reason: Definitions were established, and strapping guns to drones was deemed a dick move.

Same here, define legitimate civillian militias and take all the guns off the hands of every other random guy.

Couple years after that maybe we could start having the discussion of why you need armed death squads on your home turf but hey at least the ease of access for the general public is out, and with it a large part of the reason why the US os the only place where this happens day in and day out.
> I haven’t heard of a good rebuttal to the above reasoning

All important philosophy and epistemology has occurred in countries with free speech restrictions.