skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> distribute hate speech, dangerously factually incorrect information and harassment

Until everyone can agree on a universal arbiter for what those things mean in a concrete way, there will always be demographics who strongly disagree.

The reason free speech exists as a concept is because of a historic understanding that there fundamentally cannot be an unbiased arbiter for 'good' or 'bad' speech.

On the other side of this, the internet is increasingly controlled by a particular demographic with a particular definition of what things like 'hate speech' mean. Which suppresses and censors a wide range of topics that the other demographics do want to discuss. When the entire internet makes it impossible to express certain views, we can't claim to have free speech anymore. It's not good enough to say 'well if you don't like it then you can go and shout your views out on the street instead'.

The weapon against 'incorrect information' is education, not censorship. Censorship has never worked to actually quash 'wrongthink', it only marginalises and energises demographics who are censored, and drives them to eventually revolt. See: trump winning presidency.
This exact thing happens all the time. And not just Microsoft.

Usually you sign something that prohibits you from talking about the meetings, though.
I happen to know that URL too, but later seems the owner stopped the project and redirection domain is on sale. Of course there are many similar download websites online, though not same and easy as the "little trick" original one.
Not all at. The legal fact that it is privately owned goes against the spirit of the law in terms of freedom of speech. How many people used to stand in private squares and protest? Nobody sees Twitter as a private square. They see it as the Internet.

I am taking issue with the fact that we have allowed private companies to be the gate-keepers of what should be public spaces.
I remember installing it to watch the Feynman lectures, but it looks like Microsoft have made them available without Silverlight now:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/tuva-richar...
I think news organizations are unfortunately choosing to do non-news for ratings, though. And how is Trump interfering with the election? In principle, there are real risks with unjustified mail-in voting, and I think restrictions would protect the integrity of my vote. Do you have evidence Trump is doing this to interfere with the 2020 election?
That wasn't always the case. That was his point.
The hypocrisy of the Pro-Business Republican party is really astounding. One one hand they fight for deregulation and small government so that coal and oil companies can pollute the environment (because you know, according to Trump global warming is a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese. Yes he really believes that), and now they want to censor and shut down social media platforms? Trump was impeached and should have been kicked out of office, but thanks to the Republican party, he is still in office. I can't even tell what the Republican party even stands for anymore. Low taxes and reduced safety net? Climate denialism? Christian values?

I honestly think you could pick a random 16 year old kid off the street and they'd make a better president than Trump. That's the sad and embarrassing state of affairs that is U.S. politics. I tend to err on the free speech side when it comes to social media platforms, but when you're the U.S. president and spreading baseless conspiracy theories and blatant lies with real consequences, then you damn well should get fact checked and called out on your nonsense.

Never been a more embarrassing time to be an American.
Boost Your Productivity with the Compound Effect
No one at the CDC (at least no career bureaucrat) ever denied masks were effective, though. It's true that there was concern early on that a public run on masks would put health care workers in jeopardy, so people were absolutely told not to try to procure them. And it's also true that the WHO's messaging on this subject was terribly confusing.

But the idea that "Hah! The elites were WRONG about masks!" is just... weird. And doubly so because it's almost always promulgated by a demographic known for... not wearing masks.

I mean, seriously: if ("finally!") we're being told to wear masks, I'd expect a genuine mask evangelist to be happy, and to use this to encourage others to wear their masks. But that's not what I hear. It's like it's all a game of political gotcha.

It's not. Masks save lives. Wear your mask when you can't stay home.
Well Silverlight did have the best official avatar of any Microsoft product, Hikaru Aizawa[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikaru_Aizawa
For certain narrow classes of everyone.
Fact Check
It’s a “false equivalence” or “flawed sales tactic” to suggest planning using total costs? That’s what both engineers and business people are supposed to do - and reflexively attacking it really does not cast your motives in a good light.
This is hopelessly pedantic, but Outlook is (now) part of Microsoft Office. And matters to me the most since it's the only part of Office I hardly ever use.
Homebrew is recapitulating all of the work that previous package managers have done, while making choices like analytics and stomping on /usr/local by default that others wouldn't consider. I think there's still a place for MacPorts.
Sure, it would be great to do a followup, though anybody who left the ship could have contacted other corona people off-boat by now.

In the SF Bay area, the Santa Clara dashboard only shows 5% of those tested being positive (whatever that means, since test results are questionable), but because of the close affinity with China, I'd bet on 80% having been exposed, not 5%.
Even during the U.S. civil war, it was possible to avoid violence, for the most part. Sherman's rampage, once he decided to take the war to the people... I'm not sure what percent of death and destruction that represents. The photos of the aftermath though are remarkable. Still, most folks avoided it.
(Posted this in another thread)

No what Mr. POTUS said was
> There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent

Translation: 100% certainty that Mail-In Ballots are substantially fraudulent

He specified a 100% certainty of substantial election fraud
Moderation of non-state-managed platforms is not censorship. In fact, it would be a violation of free speech to limit private parties ability to moderate.
You just described a modern society...
This issue goes beyond Trump. People have been de-platformed on various social media sites. Twitter has taken on the role of the virtual public space. Twitter is performing a public service in their publishing of tweets. People that don't see it that way are still living in the dot-com bubble. The Internet has grown beyond what anybody had imagined. People don't go out and protest anymore because they do it online.

We will never see protests of the 60s and 70s scale today in person. People do what they did back then online. And they don't go out and protest because they feel like their voice is being broadcast enough through social media. And yet to have that censored by private companies is unacceptable when that in the modern day use case.
Software engineering has almost zero transferable skills and as developers in high wage countries are about to find out, very easy to move to cheaper markets.

I wouldn’t be worried if I was in Poland as a web software engineer. I would be very worried if I was doing that in the United States right now.

We’ve seen many times already how fast software jobs dry up in high wage countries when the economy changes.
Thanks for crafting this awesome tool, btw, what the tech stack behind this? I guess it could become much better if you can integrate the Amazon polly(text to speech engine), but that also will cost money for sure, for a free and casual usage, current version is good enough!
You could have a video demoing it on your landing page. Most site visitors aren't going to take the time to install a random desktop application and toy with it just to see if it might be something they find useful. Maybe you're ok with that, just giving you my advice if you want to increase usership.
Hack the box is good fun, I started with it the other day.
Trump Will Sign an Executive Order on Social Media Companies
I recently installed some industrial software that still uses Silverlight. I only needed some header files and promptly removed the foul beast.
West Virginia mail carrier charged with attempted absentee ballot application fraud [1]

1. https://www.whsv.com/content/news/Pendleton-County-mail-carr...
Volkswagen in final talks to seal biggest M&A deals in China EV sector – sources
> this is like saying that the President has the right to publish whatever content he wants in a specific newspaper

Nobody sees a news-paper as a public space. The fact that anybody can make a social media account and instantly publish information that can be read by anybody, and the fact that people conceptually now see public profiles as public spaces, means that we need to treat them that way.
The point of proving identity would be to curtail the bot problem. If someone can fake identification in order to get an account created, then it's trivial to just make up a fake name and picture of a person. Forcing people to not be anonymous does nothing to solve a bot problem, and causes a lot of problems. What if that person is gay with a very conservative family that would not accept them? They would be unable to speak how they please with mandatory non-anonymity.

Twitter already requires a phone number, prepaid credit cards can be very cheap, and not everyone has utility bills in their names. Many people cannot get drivers licenses. These are great for privileged people, but discriminatory against unprivileged people. I don't think stifling their voices is something we need more of.
Honestly, neither of these things would ever happen. It just doesn’t work that way and wouldn’t make sense for them to go about it that way.
Seven Harsh Truths Everybody Needs to Know
They are honestly fun to write, but then you're doing recursive descent. Having written a significant one, I felt the elegance of the concept was marred by all the workarounds creeping into the code.
I think Silverlight could have been more of a thing if MS handled their UI story better -- WPF/Silverlight was great to develop for and it did solve some problems.
I remember that Windows Phone (which also was pretty good) didn't run Silverlight sites -- I always thought that was the weirdest choice, because if it did it would have provided a great mobile experience for it's time.
From January 2020.
Seems a bit funny, the top scorers didn't have a few massive bounties, but many many little ones. Both of these accounts made most of their hits on Verizon. To get those kind of rates it's probably the same type of flaw present in many places of the system.

It's questionable if these companies are getting massive value for money if most of the bugs are oversights rather than intricate flaws in a bespoke process.

https://hackerone.com/try_to_hack?filter=type:bounty-awarded
https://hackerone.com/mlitchfield?filter=type:bounty-awarded
Thanks for the links. I am aware about the leaks and understand that the loophole isn't exactly fixed. I was concerned that it's actually published on some site and can be readily accessed by anyone.
Being a very long time Delphi and FreePascal user with tens of thousands of lines of code in active use today, I never understood why pascal wasn't running way out front of Go, Rust, Java and all these other performant languages. It's so straight forward and such a pleasure to work with.
On the other hand, WSL2 is based on virtualisation rather than NT kernel personalities. Apparently building it 'on top' or 'inside' NT ends not not being good enough.
Is it really unexpected that Wikipedia has to protect itself from disinformation, trolls, defamation, and spam, these days?

Edit: and has already gone live at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximator_(Intelligence_allian....
Not op, but to phrase it another way, consider if it's benificial to worry about - vote for who you want etc. But that doesn't mean you have to watch every political "event" - you'll just burn yourself out.

I'm not saying bad things aren't happening - just that if there's nothing more you can do, try not to envolope your life with it. It's like high school drama - it can feel like it's your entire world but in reality it doesn't necessarily matter.
I feel like these two objects need different names (especially since the difference matters).
It never works -- you gotta get them to absorb the sticker shock if you want them to respect you
Ouch this thread ruined some poor souls promotion / pay rise narrative
I use Standard Notes which doesn’t charge extra for encryption or sync, and, most importantly, is open source/free software.

Closed source cryptography is dangerous, and should be avoided whenever possible.
100% of the popular internet is a 'private square'. That's the problem.

There doesn't exist any platform right now where one can share an idea and have that idea go viral, unless the idea is first gated through private censorship.

Sure one could make their own blog or website to express their idea, but the chance of it spreading is then pretty much 0, because again any means for links or ideas to spread are all 'private squares' with their own censorship.

This is how the internet broke free speech. This is where the law needs to catch up with technology.
Yeah I hate social media platforms but Trump shutting them down would be crossing the Rubicon
I’m not arguing whether the bias should or shouldn’t exist. I’m arguing that it does exist, which you seem to be refuting for some reason. And I’m certainly going to argue that if platforms try to claim neutrality, they better show evidence of it, or else stop claiming to be neutral.

Are you okay with Facebook banning links in private messages? Why can’t I link to JoeBiden.info, a clearly marked parody website full of factual information, in a private message to a friend? What possible reason could there be for this, other than bias?

Are you okay with Twitter editorializing the president’s tweets, but not doing the same for those of Adam Schiff or Joe Biden? Both of them have promoted baseless conspiracy theories on Twitter, like suggesting Trump is a Russian agent. Yet they’ve never been “fact checked.” Are you okay with the idea that the person in charge of the fact checking initiative at Twitter has a history of publicly calling Trump a “Nazi” and a “racist tangerine?” Does this seem like an arrangement that will result in anything but biased “fact checks?”

I’m having a hard time seeing how this is good for critical thought, as you seem to be suggesting. Telling people what to think is not the basis upon which critical thought develops. If anything, such editorializing will only further polarize people and increase their emotional attachment to pre-existing beliefs.
Good to hear; it’d be hard to be capable of the perception of the start without also being capable of seeing the road past & through the conclusion at the end of your comment. I just tend to take issue with the naïve cynic nihilist take i detected in the latter half of your initial comment.

ps you may enjoy Nietzsche if you haven’t been exposed to him yet - his project essentially starts with - OK, we’ve been freed from the prison of (religious) dogma, now what? His greatest aim, imo, was to answer the question of the (totally true, accurate) nihilistic observation you’ve reached. start w beyond good and evil
I believe he's referring to when the last Holy Roman Emperor abdicated in 1806. "The empire was dissolved on 6 August 1806, when the last Holy Roman Emperor Francis II (from 1804, Emperor Francis I of Austria) abdicated, following a military defeat by the French under Napoleon at Austerlitz (see Treaty of Pressburg)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire
Although you could make an argument that the Roman Empire in the west ended in 476 C.E. when the last Roman emperor, Romulus, was overthrown by the Germanic leader Odoacer, who became the first Barbarian to rule in Rome. In 800 the Pope gave Charlemagne the title of Roman Emperor so there's a gap of 324 years with no emperor in the west. Meanwhile, the Roman Empire in the east continued to function.
> You could, of course, run both SLAAC and DHCPv6 simultaneously, but why?

Because it’s what you supposed to do by design?

Here’s a good thread on the IETF IPv6 working group mailing list about it:

https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ipv6/mqa0qZvlFF8lQWjdZ...
Giving the government the explicit ability to enumerate what speech is and is not worthy of protection from Twitter is not a very pro free speech idea. It does not take a large amount of imagination to see how the ability to decide what speech must be carried can be easily abused by the government.

Even without explicit abuse, this is effectively the government saying "you must transmit this information, no matter what", which is an unwelcome intrusion of governmental power, in my opinion.
Well, they’re getting bad PR now for screwing the author over ...
Standard Notes is open source (and free software) today, while still in business with a business model similar to yours.

It also allows people to read, audit, and trust the crypto code, which your model does not. For people like me, that’s a hard pass.
It seems like this could be achieved with login.gov, if anyone wanted. It requires MFA (password + U2F/TOTP) which should be sufficient to prove who you are and that you are signing something. There’s integration docs for government services.
As I commented in another thread, this is an argument for letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. (The person I was commenting to there utterly missed my point.)

We don't know that the mail-in ballot system here in California is absolutely, with 100% certainty, immune to abuse. We do have reasonably good circumstantial evidence at this point that it does not appear to increase the chance for voter fraud, and furthermore, we have reasonably good evidence, based on multiple studies conducted over many years that anyone can easily find if they care to, that there are very, very few fraudulent ballots cast in American elections. There is, however, also reasonably good evidence that American elections have a history of efforts to prevent eligible voters from casting votes at all, and that this is far and away the kind of "voter fraud" that we need to be concerned about.

As a general axiom, therefore, in American elections, campaigns that have as their goal making it more difficult for eligible voters to vote in the name of "reducing fraud" should be viewed with, well, a high degree of suspicion.
> Nobody sees a news-paper as a public space. The fact that anybody can make a social media account and instantly publish information that can be read by anybody, and the fact that people conceptually now see public profiles as public spaces, means that we need to treat them that way.

This just doesn’t make sense to me. Ever since the first anti-spam technology was deployed, online web forums and mailing lists have employed moderation. There’s law on this going back to the early 1990s when AOL and CompuServe had to moderate their platforms. Nothing has really changed except that there are more options and more ways to get the message out than ever before.

Want a public space? Simply get a server and throw up a phpBB or wordpress or mastodon or gab or GNUSocial instance and you’ve got your own space. As president, trump could easily get the word out via email to his millions of registered supporters and they would flock to the new space and post there.
I Built Another Writing Application
I think it’s cool that the markdown still works when I stop paying.

Imagine if the author of grep charged $5/month for the utility.
I'm not opposed to it, but I imagine you would have a lot of people very hesitant to put their opinions on record with a system that is controlled by the government. The big benefit with Twitter is it's co-mingled with citizen and government employees alike and I'm not sure how you'd promote a government run system. Governments needs a subpoena to access records from a private company (theoretically) but if that layer of protection isn't there because the system is owned by a government, then I doubt anyone would want to use it for more than press releases, wedding announcements, births, obituaries and things like that.
Interviewed at Amazon three times before getting hired. Last time I was older than you. Got into a great team, in an incredibly important part of AWS.

You can apply every six months. Thing of each attempt as an opportunity to learn.
Maybe that's why he's selling lol. That, or the fact that tiktok is working on an ad system similar to youtube, which will let the influences make money. That'll kill this.
dawkins whole argument is evolution produces the appearance of design
Bro it's the constant struggle between the individual and the group there's nothing new here

Anyone can examine the evidence and agree as to the evidence but disagree as to what the evidence entails

I look at the modern state of corporacy and the rise of working from home and I see we ought to go back to traditional principles whereas the majority view it as an incentive to dress even further down

I'm not sure about you but I don't feel good about siding with the hoi polloi on principle and for that reason alone I'd rather wear a shirt with a collar than a dainty T

Edit: by the way do you believe that every person you see in a shirt and tie is suffering in an impractical outfit?
It wouldn't be acceptable to me but ISPs aren't regulated in that way and have attempted to use the argument that requiring them to carry information without any modification/discrimination is a violation of the ISPs free speech rights.

It's weird how the administration that is responsible for de-regulating ISPs also wants to regulate platform-holders because they're concerned about how they treat their message.
This is where it gets tricky. Because 99.9% of the popular internet is 'non state-managed platforms'.

There doesn't exist an avenue to meaningfully exercise free speech on the internet. You can make your own blog, but it will never go viral. Because the only means for something to go viral is that 99.9% composed of privately censored platforms. We've gotten into a situation where censorship has changed shape from 'one is prevented from expressing a view' to 'a view is prevented from reaching an audience'. Which is far worse than old school Stalin era censorship.

This is not an easy question, but it is clearly a case of the law needing to be updated in light of how technology has evolved. We can't claim to have free speech if there's de-facto no way to exercise it on the primary communication channel of our time.

Concrete example: it has recently come out that youtube has been silently censoring a wide array of comments that express anti-china views. Like most users, I was completely unaware that this is going on. Youtube distorted my perception of reality by suppressing an entire class of opinions from being visible. They didn't tell anyone that they're doing it, there was no transparency, and when they were caught, they said 'whoops it was a bug sorry lol'. That's crazy. What else are they suppressing? I do want laws to stop that even if it exposes me to comments I don't like.

Or consider the degenerate case: Imagine Facebook takes over the entire internet. They buy Google, they buy Twitter, they buy pretty much everything than an average user will ever see. And Zucc comes along and says, from now on any mention of a certain political view on any of these platforms will be censored. This is ok by the rules you're proposing, but it's clearly not ok in terms of the spirit of free speech laws.
This article has my Kindle highlights + Anki setup at the end:

https://blog.readwise.io/remember-more-of-what-you-read-with...
Show HN: Convert SVGs to GCode