skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>The 2010s seem to be a decade ... without any fundamentally new technological developments.

I wouldn't go that far. The cloud became a thing in 2010 and from that big data appeared allowing data science to appear.

The 2010s is the era of data science and ML, which is a larger leap than many give credit for. The 2010s are just like the '80s in that new technology appeared, but end consumers didn't see much of a difference until the late '90s. Just yesterday CA gave a license to GM to legally allow fully self driving cars.
There has been an issue with auditing. Internally in an audit firm the focus has moved in the last 5-8 years almost entirely to compliance.

It is MUCH MUCH more important that you document everything per the insane number of checklists with sometimes wildly overboard list of requirements than actually look (or have time) to find errors. Actually finding a problem, actual accuracy of audits is no longer emphasized.

As a result, staff go into drudge mode on all sides, some of the work is boilerplate wasted effort, so folks on all sides can get into a lets get through this mentality rather than a lets look into this mentality.

This is in part because one stick here, a review process / PCAOB inspection process is HIGHLY focused on the documentation / checklist part of things. No credit is given for actually finding problems at clients, but LOTS of demerits if everything is not in exact documentation format it needs to be.

Seriously, the PCAOB calls things "audit failures" when something like the work around an item wasn't properly documented in their view EVEN THOUGH the actual numbers were accurate. So auditor signed off on right number, and that is a "failure"

That's a change from past, if numbers were wrong and they had been signed off on, THAT was an "audit failure".

But now, as long as you have followed the steps and checked the boxes, then even IF you miss something, that's OK, because it's "reasonable" not absolute assurance and there is a note that a "well performed" audit may still miss things. Well performed has been interpreted to mean huge amounts of documentation.

This matters legally too - the payouts on these failures may be surprisingly small.

So doing gobs of paperwork is of great importance, and there is little reward left in terms of actually finding problems both by PCAOB and because that can ruffle feathers at client that hired you. So every incentive is for massive amounts of somewhat thoughtless documentation and less substance.

Solutions.

- Name audit partner on report - the fact this isn't done is ridiculous.

- The auditors could be hired by the people who use the audit if possible.

- Get rid of a LOT of boilerplate, it kills staff motivation - folks just go intro drudge / checkbox mode.

- Then add some randomized forensic level rather than checkbox level work, with deep deep checks that staff might enjoy doing and feel like they were really looking for stuff rather than just "papering" the audit.

- Focus on RESULTS. Did auditors sign off on numbers that were right or wrong. That should be entire focus of auditing. Reward folks who find errors. Literally, have a pool of funds for auditors who find the biggest misstatements.

- Include list of auditor proposed adjusting entries to client financials in audit report. Again, focus on the actual results / quality of client / auditor work.

One can dream :)
It’s Past Time to Take Out Our (Space) Trash
You have to read the whole sentence:

> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

The law doesn't establish two categories, called "publisher" and "platform." It says, if User writes something on Website, then Website will not be treated as the publisher of whatever User wrote. Instead, User will be treated as the publisher. It defines who is responsible for the content that is served by Website: the User who wrote it, not the Website that served it. At no point does it create a category called "publisher" who is subject to different rules from a category called "platform."
I spent a weekend with my east texas relatives shooting pumpkins with big guns and my hearing has not recovered since that was like 15 years ago...
Everyone is wired to have a worldview. And although people think that their brains are different and have some special type of rationalism supporting their belief systems, that's not the case.

I think that the reality is that worldviews are necessarily reductionist at some point. Think about just literally looking down a road far into the distance. If you can see far enough the stuff at the end of that road just looks like a tiny dot which you can't make out.

No one can actually predict the future. Some people like me think that technology will probably shortly change things dramatically.

I would be interested to hear your worldview and predictions for 2029 and the 2030s. But just a warning, I am going to classify those predictions as beliefs.
> should explicitly not include the editorial decisions of a publisher

what happens when I want to run CatTalk.com and, and its against the rules to talk about Dogs, and someone comes in talking about Dogs? Shouldnt you have the ability to run and moderate and host the content on your site that you decide?
The text is very clear. It protects the rights of an owner of a website to control that website, which is their private property. It does not in any way heap additional responsibilities or legal vulnerabilities upon “publishers”. It’s straightforward if read and interpreted in good faith.
Couldn't vacuum tube manufacturers pivot to semiconductors, at least somewhere in the production process.
HN already has moderators who do a very good job of filtering posts in a timely manner. HN's exposure to liability for libel would be rather minimal. People and companies are exposed to legal risk all the time, everywhere they go, and somehow they don't curl up into a ball and die of starvation in their basements.

Big, diverse sites like Facebook and Twitter need Section 230 because they can't effectively use human moderators to sift through the content. They have to rely on machine learning, which has false negative rates magnitudes higher than a human. Yet at the same time, they're constantly trying to shape and edit and, basically, narrate the user content, as part of their monetization strategy. That's their dilemma.

Moreover, the distinction between publisher and distributor will still exist. The alternative to strong moderation is no moderation--you're just a distributor, like a Usenet node or the telephone company. But that's more difficult to monetize. (Of course, the legal landscape would be more nuanced than that--traditional libel law wouldn't demand a simple dichotomy between moderation and no moderation.)

Without Section 230 companies would have a more difficult time trading profit potential for legal liability, but it would still be done. Newspapers, write-in columns, bulletin boards, and other forums were around for centuries, all the same exposed to libel law. Even the internet was around for decades prior to Section 230.
Funding your companies, advising your executives and politicians, building your products, and smack talking on HN.

It is a funny question though. I might posit that it's not a philosophy so much as a subculture that appreciates a certain flavour of writing. There's a form, like a prog-rock anthem or a minimalist piece, where writers ourselves tend to appreciate it, but where most people are just looking for something to dance to.

If I could characterize most of the criticism I've read of rationalist writing, it would be that their main complaint is they can't dance to it.
Oh, yeah, I was 19 at that time and I avoided them, they were up to no good. This strange combination of sleazy and menacing at the same time. Precisely the type of people you do not want to join in their car.

Therefore they mostly preyed on international tourists at the airport.
A big city with world-class skiing nearby is pretty rare worldwide. If you don't appreciate it that's ok but many other people do appreciate it.
I assumed it was a Star Trek reference.
Note that the test actually proposed (not the press release blurb) says:

> The moderation practices of a provider of interactive computer services are politically biased if the provider moderates information provided by information content providers in a manner that [...] disproportionately restricts or promotes access to, or the availability of, information from a political party, political candidate, or political viewpoint

That means that any service that chooses to do something like suppress known conspiracy theories is going to fall afoul of the proposed changes.
>IMO most egregious of which is ag-IP owners trying to claim ownership/control over other people's plants that have been pollinated by their GMO plants due to pollen drift.

Addressed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24761841

>I think a better analogy would be: you invent a new mousetrap, you offer it for $5 for only catching mice, but if it catches a rat they owe you $100. The user has to artificially restrict the fundamental utility of the product or else be subject to legal penalties.

I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with this. If anything, I'm for it because it incentives the manufacturer to make effective products. The more effective their mouse trap is, the more money they make. Sounds like a good thing to me. It's not any different than unreal engine/unity charging you a % of your game's revenue as royalties.
Totally. I sometimes made the mistake of "venting downwards" or wanting to be more transparent with the team and it wasn't a good experience.

Individual Contributors usually do not want ambiguity or to have a lesser impression of the company or of someone, it isn't good for anyone.

They also lack the context you have and jump to a lot of conclusions that are usually unfair.

It's a hard job!
You're aware that this will result in _more_ content from being moderated off the sites, right?
Case in point: two town halls yesterday. One gets asked about their most current scandal (tax returns), another doesn't get a single question about their scandal (burisima). The media is undoubtably carrying water for Joe Biden. That isn't even arguable anymore. The question is why?
> To be a bit more explicit: at no point in any court case regarding Section 230 is there a need to determine whether or not a particular website is a "platform" or a 'publisher.' What matters is solely the content in question. If that content is created by someone else, the website hosting it cannot be sued over it.

> Really, this is the simplest, most basic understanding of Section 230: it is about placing the liability for content online on whoever created that content, and not on whoever is hosting it. If you understand that one thing, you'll understand most of the most important things about Section 230.

The way I understand it, these big sites aren't simply hosting content, they are themselves creators through editorializing content and so should not enjoy a blanket immunity.
>He's interviewing people who are entering a Master's program.

You're right I missed that. Fair point.

>I'm probably biased, but I often state this in the real world :-) It has not been a problem in professional settings.

The concept does come up, but I normally don't hear it this way. It comes up in different forms sure. Maybe it has, and I just gloss over not thinking about the language.
Don't they already use MySQL for example? I don't think it would stop them in any way, unless some lawyers had some really antiquated views, coming straight from the 90's
I guess the trained models themselves are not free,

But George is selling it fir the same price to them as well, they just don’t want to rely on him.
Ah, as a heading, now it makes sense. It doesn't work as an actual question to a person, but as part of that context the question mark is acting more like a colon.
Hawley's plan is just one of them.

Some people, including both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, have called for a complete repeal of Section 230 at various times in the last year.
Because of the 1992 Higher Education Amendments to the 1965 Higher Education Act and the 1993 Student Loan Reform Act, colleges have no incentive to compete on price: anyone who can't pay for tuition out-of-pocket can get government money to do so.

FAFSA is basically a perfect price discrimination system for colleges: why wouldn't they attempt to extract the maximum amount possible from each student?

An additional factor to consider is that higher education has increased the number of roles in their org-chart where Baumol's original proposition applies: the number of administrators in higher education just keeps rising. I'm not super familiar with the economics of orchestras, but I would be very surprised if the San Francisco Symphony is staffed with 4x the number of administrators that it was in 1978, even though the number of chairs in the orchestra remains the same.
What is the optimal risk adjustment ratio? And it is chosen by reason or by personal preference? Many software engineers are a bit risk averse and just do what they are told to do. Many entrepreneurs would rather experience the rushes of a business roller-coaster and walk away with no money than just sit and program as told.
Exactly. Also, people have a stronger uncomfortable negative reaction to news they don't like than a positive reaction to news they agree with, and extremists think even neutral descriptions of reality are biased against them, so if you show a neutral selection to a non-neutral person they're likely to see it as biased because it doesn't align with their perception of what the proportions should be. Nobody will ever agree on what "neutral" means, which means most likely it'll mean "biased in favor of who currently has political power".
That's really a manipulation of the term "moderation". They aren't removing swear words or nipples... They are deciding what is the "correct" information and then decide what we all get to see. If they got out of business because they abused the immunity grant they were given so be it. I won't miss them. All of social media can burn for all I care.
My layman's understanding of chemo is that it's meant to be systemic: surgeries and radiation are targeted at the tumor itself, while chemo is meant to hopefully wipe out cells that have reached other parts of the body.

But the description from this article suggests they're trying to make the chemo more targeted to the site of the tumor. That seems to counteract what I had understood to be the point of chemo.

Can you explain? (In case it wasn't obvious from the above, I have low knowledge in this area.)
Yeah that definitely sounds like something meth-based to me.
Good catch, I suppose I see them as more 'Up' because of the perceived narcissism and the very real 98th percentile IQ membership requirement, the 2%, so to speak.
I'm a huge fan of the novel by Peter Watts and have been excited for this tribute since seeing the director's (Danil Krivoruchko) early look development work.

Also, make sure to check out https://blindsight.space/ for more BTS + an interview with the author.
> And yet he was ahead of almost everyone in doing that - no other politicians or agencies were calling for it, most were denouncing it.

You’ve been fooled by fake news. Just google and you’ll find the truth. Here’s an article from February 2 “All over the world, countries are imposing travel bans on visitors who’ve been to China“ https://qz.com/1795615/coronavirus-travel-bans-on-china-impo...

So it’s the exact opposite of what you said - politicians all over the world were doing just that.

According to a later analysis at https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/13/joe-biden/...

“ By the group’s count, Biden is correct about 45 nations restricting travel from China before the United States.That number covers variations of travel restrictions in effect up to and including Feb. 1.”
What does "politically neutral" mean, anyway? What happens if I establish a political party whose solitary goal is to torture babies, kittens and puppies to death? Is that suddenly a "political opinion" which must be protected?
Bosnia and Herzegovina. I was 10 when the war begun. I spent 4 years in city of Gorazde,
under siege, without electricity, communications and running water. I started to write a book (in english) about these 4 years but it got too difficult to re-live so I put it on hold for a while. Not sure anyone would ever want to read this.
one of his links (EFF) mentions "Fair and transparent moderation" ... I'd be happy to see that, but aside from it being something societies have had problems with in the past; can anyone actually suggest that's what's happening now?

Are twitter and facebook being fair and transparent?

Isn't the very fact we're having the argument evidence that it's such a difficult problem we need some interim solution while the perfect AI algorithm gets worked out? Some solution that can last for a while if the perfect AI moderators never come.
There is good reason to reform section 230. Right now courts are applying the liability so broadly that companies aren’t liable even after they are notified about illegal behaviours on their site. In a court case involving Grindr refusing to take down a profile created by someone’s ex-bf that was being used to harass him, their refusing to so even after contact by lawyers was protected under section 230 and the case was thrown out. I’d be all for a modified version of section 230 that required sites to have a contact email and made them liable if they don’t address certain issues in an appropriate time period.

It’s also worth mentioning that before section 230 if you didn’t moderate you weren’t liable so in certain senses it’s a censorship bill rather than a free speech one since it protects removing speech. That being said I do understand the need to moderate sites and remove some content, hence my proposal of the modified version rather than a call for its elimination entirely.
Am I crazy for wanting a license that prohibits the free use of a project by mega-corps? "If you're a company valued > $XXX usage of this code is prohibited".

I guess I can see OSS as a "free food" stall. Almost everyone can have a bite but I'm not fine with billionaires coming in to steal the recipes. They already have the means to increase their wealth efficiently, society would have much benefit if these mechanisms of wealth increase involved giving some of it back.
Having read it over and thought about it I don't think I'd want to give up all the freedoms we have on posting whatever the heck we want. If it means Facebook ends up with hate speech and antivax groups so be it. I think the alternative is worse: where if I were going to build some type of new forum I'd have to be liable for everything anyone posts. I want to see new ideas being tried without fear of litigation.
Very simple. No primary moderation action should be made based on human input. Automated moderation should look for identifiable harms (i.e. illicit content, directed threats, terrorism), and absolutely nothing should be removed or blocked based on vague and nebulously defined concerns over "misinformation". Voila -- political neutrality in moderation.
Moderators, stop editorializing via title manipulation! The title of this article is “Section 230 Is The Subject of The Most Effective Legal Propaganda I've Ever Seen”, and the article only makes sense if read in light of its actual title as given by the author, not the edited manipulated title you have given it on HN!
I think one difference is the existing giants have smarted up to the fact that new competing startups can be existential threats to their business like they were to their former incumbents, and have started putting much more focus on gobbling them up with cash before they become fully fledged competitors instead of trying to out-compete them.
You guys might enjoy http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan/essential.html
I'm not a republican, nor a Trump supporter, but I disagree. I think the courts would be able to create a body of case law over whether a removal was due to a post being "violent, obscene or harassing" or for some other reason.

We can't be terrified of regulating platforms that have massive amounts of control over what most people see or hear about.
Earning lots of money sets you up to donate lots of money to effective charities. Many rationalists believe that's the best thing you can be doing for global quality-of-life.
Shielding your folks is important, but so is nurturing them. I really like Rands in Repose (https://randsinrepose.com) because he talks about both.
Not really related to the writing system, but when giving directions in English and German (as a native Spanish speaker) I tend to say right/rechts when I mean left/links and viceversa. It's kind of weird.
This is from other users (with a certain amount of karma) voting down these comments. See "Why don't I see down arrows?" on https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#:~:text=Why%20don'...
An amusing though factually incorrect trope.
Why now? Greed has been prevalent throughout history.
I've never heard anyone say that pre-Uber cab companies were better. But I could always be wrong.
Heh, it's almost as if "introvert"/"extrovert" are just labels we use without any scientific basis. ...
Yeah that can’t be right. [There’s also the w3c version of the spec](https://www.w3.org/TR/2dcontext/) but I don’t see anything about that there either.

The only thing that might be true is that it’s essentially a frozen feature set, with nothing new being planned, but again I don’t see a mention of that.
And during the last gasp of rock at the beginning of the 21st century, Detroit brought us the White Stripes!
Those are comments from non-democrats
"Publisher" here doesn't refer to a special legal status. This sentence just means that, if you post something on a website, it's still you and not the website who said it. This law is applicable to any website, even ones which make no attempt to be a neutral platform.
Tinnitus appeared to me at the beginning of this godforsaken year of 2020 and I think I have two separate types of tinnitus, with one most likely being due to neck tension (which is more intense on my left ear). I know this because when I stretch my chin to my chest (like exampled in https://www.healthline.com/health/neck-tension#treatments) I start to hear a more pronounced wooshing sound on my ears and gives a burning sensation to my neck and shoulders. I would really appreciate if you could share the neck exercises that you're using.

For the record, I take great care on computer ergonomics so I've, at least, have that covered. And yes, Tinnitus is a curse.
Remdesivir was tested and found to be effective against Ebola.

It just wasn’t as effective as antibody treatments so got shelved in favor of them.
For that matter, a policy of restricting hate speech will currently restrict one party more than another. A policy of prohibiting disinformation that could lead to voter suppression will currently restrict one party more than another. A policy of prohibiting misinformation about the ongoing pandemic will currently restrict one party more than another.