skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agree. My hunch is that the US government is using money laundering and “know your customer” laws to force payment processors to play cops.

I’ve long hated money laundering and “know your customer” laws for many reasons. They’re a giant privacy violation. And for what? These laws measurably don’t work to stop big banks from financing terrorism and human trafficking. There are several reasons they don’t work. One is that, the DOJ will come down hard on small American businesses but refuses to actually investigate or prosecute large, offshore companies. They also can’t work because the vast majority of money laundering happens with cash. Even if these laws could meaningfully reduce money laundering, who does that benefit? The vast majority of money laundering is for victimless crimes, including the consensual adult sales of drugs, gambling, porn, and prostitution. These laws simply work to give large incumbents a regulatory advantage over their competitors.
That should be illegal, but hey, at least they support noble causes, so let them be. It sounds cynic but this is their game.
There is a subtle element here... US lawmakers have control over what is legal and illegal. US VISA won't process activities that are illegal in the particular country. It's not that religious conservatives have power over the credit card companies.

I also hope you're not saying that the US should allow child sexual assault which is the issue in this case.
I think that gaming is such a competitive industry that in order to stay relevant, you need to either essentially rip your customers off or overwork your employees. I hear that jobs at EA and King these days are relatively chill, and both are hated for their monetization strategies. While investor pressure certainly doesn't help, I think the same dynamic would exist even if all video game companies were bootstrapped.
Would love this. Psilocybin is the only thing I've found that knocks me out of my depression for a week or two when I'm too low to function. But I wish I could get those benefits without having to commit a full day to the psychedelic aspects of it (as I've gotten older it can feel less exciting and more like a chore).
So If I sell 1 app for $101 Billion do I now have a Monopoly on the mobile app market since I will have >40% of the revenue?
> I think there’s a pretty clear difference between “3rd party smartphone software distribution” and “3rd party smartphone software distribution for ~45% of all American phone users, and I get to pick which users, and coincidentally I only pick Apple users”. You’re the one stacking the deck in that instance, not Apple.

Not really, if you look at it from the perspective of software developers. If an Android developer no longer wants to be a customer of the Play Store (or gets rejected by them), they can go to a 3rd party app store or tell their users to sideload. An iOS developer has no options besides Apple: they either stick with them or essentially `rm -rf AllMyIOsInvestment/`.
If you're living in Amazon world, systemd is only a secondary problem :-(

... and I say that as an ardent user of Devuan.
I wonder if someone comes up with a neat formula for the perimeter of an ellipse. Keppler gave up...
Forget the staged videos, there's a whole heap of categories of those. However, there are tons of real ones,where predominantly women,were duped by men and ended up on videos either by filming secretly,or agreeing on the basis it won't be shared with anyone. I remember reading a UK based woman's ordeal trying to get rid of the content hee ex uploaded. Multiple jurisdictions, variations in laws and attitudes towards such cases and the amount of money needed just so PornHub would delete the video. There are lots of issues with these platforms and people often don't quite know,or can possibly know,where the content is legit and where it's just rape videos on demand.
> maybe there shouldn't be a payment processor duopoly

I agree, but this is another problem even if there is a link, and both are not mutually exclusive

> businesses should be allowed to act ethically (within the bounds of the law)

I don't get your point there. Who forces PornHub to act like they do?
The number of engineers working on a product is not the same as the number of engineers needed to build a product.
Both can be true
Hey, nice to see this made it to the front page :). I launched this app on HN in October by the way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24921127

My current, somewhat vague end vision for Findka is to be a stream processing tool for end users. You subscribe to a number of feeds/streams/sources, and then Findka lets you transform them into output feeds/sinks. You’ll be able to choose how much you want algorithms to help out. The goal is "all your content in one place," but more sophisticated than what you can do now with current aggregators like Feedly.
If the series don’t cancel out nicely (likely, I would guess), wouldn’t you end up with some infinite sum?

If so, as this example shows (contour integrals in a closed form?) “closed form” is loosely defined, but I think most would say something with an infinite sum wouldn’t be one (but then, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-form_expression#Analyti... says:

“In particular, special functions such as the Bessel functions and the gamma function are usually allowed, and often so are infinite series and continued fractions. On the other hand, limits in general, and integrals in particular, are typically excluded.[citation needed]”
I still use KBFS, but I don't use the other features as much anymore. I moved the encrypted git repos to private GitHub repos, which was fine for what I was doing. I never used the chat much. I couldn't get anyone in my circle interested in it so there wasn't a lot of value for me.

I feel like Keybase missed a lot of money prior the acquihire. I would've spent $xx/month or year for some of the capabilities or increased storage in KBFS. Additionally, it didn't integrate well with other environments (especially mobile) and applications. Dropbox and others expose their contents to other applications on mobile OSes. If Keybase had done that for KBFS, it would've been fantastic for me. I had been keeping a lot of org files in KBFS (still have them there, but backed up to other locations). Being able to pair something like beorg + KBFS would've been very convenient. Or KBFS + textastic.

But I had to open the files inside a plaintext viewer inside the Keybase app. And that's just one possible UX improvement. If they'd been willing to take customer money for some of the things, they could've afforded to work on those kinds of enhancements.
When I buy things with my Visa and accidentally break them, Visa buys me a new one.

When a business screws me over, Visa takes my payment back.

You can argue that the core activity of processing payments is a commodity (and it isn't, because building a merchant network as big as Visa's is incredibly difficult), but you can't argue that they don't add any value on top of that.
Nonsense.

There’s an inherent risk in payment processing which needs to be evaluated before taking on a customer. You’d end up with loads of chargeback fraud if you took everyone on. It’s fair enough saying that clients should only be denied once they’ve broken the law, but often the payment processor is the enabler & it’d be too late waiting for illegalities to be detected and prosecuted accordingly. Best to stop it before!
> From credit card debt to billions...

...of also debt. 2.2 billion.

I struggle to understand how their expenses are so high. Or why investors are happy to keep buying into a company that has failed to ever be profitable. Look at the cap tables. They've gone into massive deficit every year running an app. A $3B/year app.
User-generated content always has at least some terrible stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if it's true. The real question is whether these sites are entitled to some equivalent of the DMCA Safe Harbor if they attempt reasonable policing. I think the answer is yes and I think automated analysis and ID verification is sufficient so long as they pass human-reported cases on to law enforcement.

I believe this for Pornhub but I also believe it for Youtube and Facebook or whoever else. It doesn't really matter if your site is a porn site or a family pictures site. You should be allowed to have user-generated content with some reasonably high-sensitivity auto-detector coupled with human reports that are passed on to law enforcement and be indemnified.
Can you point to some of the free features they've taken back? I have been using VirtualBox nearly every day at work for the past 4 years, and my experience is that if anything, it's improved in quality and free features since the Oracle acquisition.

I do realise how toxic it is to have the proprietary extension pack as the source of advanced features, but the only thing that's I really, really need from that is USB 2.0. It's not like new features are even extension pack exclusives either, most of them land in the open core from the start.
Hi! Would typesense be good for a general web page search system (algolia-like), or it's designed for structured entities only (products, recipes...)

Why did you built it instead of using other open source engines? eg postgres text search
I think a lot of the critique people had towards the game has merit. Or, it strikes me as a strawman to reduce their ideas to "ideology".
How would you know that the activity was criminal before it has been judged in a court?
Yep, but they were mandatory there. Are they mandatory for you?

Kind of a big difference.
I had a theory about why very very skilled people aren't promotted as they deserve : because they make hard problems look simple.

On the other hand, the not so skilled ones...
Can you run it in a VM? Where’s the ISO?
Fast, faster, fastest: a history of supercomputers from the CDC 6600 to Fugaku
BetaList ( https://betalist.com ) turned 10 years old today. For the majority of time it was run by just me, generating $100k/year in revenue on average (earlier years less, later years more). I’ve now delegated all the daily operations to a contractor who spends a few hours a day to keep things going. So technically it’s two people right now, but less than half a FTE total.
We live in a society and basically any enterprise has an obligation to not help another person or enterprise engage in crime - a gun store is obligated to not sell someone a gun if they express an intent to use it to engage in crime.

That said, the issue here is a "fishing expedition". I'm sure Pornhub makes some effort to screen content for illegality but the problem is some still gets through 'cause of scale and costs. I don't know if Pornhub has safe harbor protections or not but I suspect the main target is effectively porn in general.
AFAIK the corrosive factor is the application of the primacy of group identity first and abandonment of science. Embracing stories and feelings while ignoring reproducible findings and falsifiable hypothesis.
It really is. Something also really interesting was the Sears experiment, where the company was restructured away from the internal command economy you described to something more like an inner market economy with interesting results.

Beyond what I think about giving market socialism some solid experiments, I think it might also be worth it to redo some small scale experimentation and analysis on command economies done modernly and attempt to quantify the various tradeoffs and issues with it.

There are just so many interesting and promising things in this sector that look ripe for possibly extremely impactful and disruptive research and experimentation.
> Most apps don't need scaling anyway and if you do

Man, exactly right. Many of guys here would love crypto once you stop asking why and start asking how.

The most lucrative projects these days are completely frontend UI, they don't even their own backends they as just read state from the nearest node when the client connects their wallet.

Some people forgot that the scalability game was to convert traffic into money. So ditch that, and remember you are in the money game.
It was Java. I was intrigued by some of the things with Clojure, especially transducers as described in the post by Rich Hickey https://cognitect.com/blog/2014/8/6/transducers-are-coming.
> Funding criminal activity can itself be a crime.

Yes, it can, but the question is who is going to decide it.

Going with this argument any organization large enough would be criminal.

I am pretty sure that Google and Apple and Facebook and Amazon they somewhere fund or support knowingly or unknowingly some kind of criminal activity.

That doesn't seem to be a problem for payment processors, though.

Neither is a problem that some funky stuff shows on Youtube from time to time which is promptly taken down when somebody reports it.

The question is whether PH did this knowingly and whether it is Mastercard's responsibility to act on it and how much of this is realy up to Mastercard to judge.

If PH is taking down any content that is reported and deactivating accounts then that is basically the same thing as Youtube does and we are now in gray territory when PH is being punished for not being to Mastercard's liking for some reason.
Yes, in the same way it's the job of the bartender to check if there are underaged drinkers in the bar and do their due diligence. Delegation of responsibility is necessary because 1. nobody wants to live in a police state because that's what you need if everything would immediately be escalated to law enforcement, 2. the owner of an establishment has domain knowledge that the police does not have, 3. handing the responsibility over to law enforcement would immediately give law enforcement an excuse to have total access to all private matters, harming everyone else's privacy.
The House held hearings on supposed voting irregularities in Ohio: https://www.c-span.org/video/?184728-1/voting-irregularities.... (Jerry Nadler remarked in this hearing that “my experience in New York is that paper ballots are extremely susceptible to fraud.”)

Democrats on the House Judiciary committee released a report claiming that claimed Republicans cheated in the Ohio recount: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/something-rotten-o...

A fun thing about the 2004 theories is that they were based mainly on exit polls showing Kerry won. (Bush was ahead by 2 points in the actual vote.) Today we know that exit polls are probably unreliable and may well underestimate conservative votes.
First, imagine a spherical cow!
You can’t always know. That’s why places like PayPal are very heavy handed and over the top with fraud detection. It’s being proactive (whether for good or not).
OP here.
Just found out that the post made it to HN. Thanks for sharing and I'll be replying to some comments.
So don't buy their hardware? It's not a secret it's locked down so why are you giving them money and then complaining?
FDA Advisory Panel Expected to Approve Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 Vaccine
Credit card companies already discriminate against hypnosis videos because they believe it removes consent, obviously too dumb to spend 5 minutes figuring out that hypnosis requires someone to want to be hypnotized and be willing throughout the entirety for it to have any effect.
Maybe it shouldn’t be but the laws currently on the books makes some enforcement the payment processors job.
This is designed to compete with Instagram/FB/Whatsapp Stories: https://www.pocket-lint.com/apps/news/instagram/138416-what-...

Basically mobile-first tappable web pages. Design-wise it's distinct from most web links as they require you to scroll to read. Here you just tap through pages, like you would on an ebook.
Cambridge researchers: Hip Hop is helping tackle stigma around mental health
It was reckless, and ill-informed to boot.
Maybe that it is your cue to move your server from AWS to OVH*

* I dont have any idea about OVH
1) Great reason for a business to accept crypto, but make me want to use crypto as a consumer

2) The whole point is that Pornhub isn't operating a completely legal business
Mastercard is so big that them choosing to ban some recipients is almost like banning these recipients from existing. I know there’s visa but I can imagine that as a company that’s a huge stab in the guts. Imagine having a product banned by the iOS apps tore!
I am not a fan of PornHub because I feel that many of their practices are unethical. That said, as with so many other controversial topics, keeping things legal is ultimately better as it provides opportunities for oversight and regulation. Things being legal don't make them okay though, I am in favor of legalizing prostitution but I also believe it should not exist in the first place.

Kristof's piece is a classic "moral panic" article. It could have been written basically at any time in the last 100 years (at least). What is different this time is that the focus is on a modern delivery medium, the internet. But scandalized reporting about the wide distribution and availability of child pornography is nothing new. I remember being a kid and seeing headlines in the newspaper about "internet pedophile porn web rings" being taken in by the police, that was in the 1990s.

As for the motivations behind the people pushing the narrative, they're diverse. Some are religious, some are political, some have nefarious motives. Ultimately these things always distract from the thing no-one ever wants to do: hear from the victims and find real ways to prevent the abuse.
Let's be real, allowing anonymous users upload pornographic content that can potentially be a felony is insane! You must verify those users. Child pornography has to stop and this is one issue IDGAF about your internet privacy rights
What? That's awesome. I don't really care that much about having an account but the Geforce Experience app requires me to re-login every few months and I always have trouble remembering the password. It's just a hassle all the time.
If one is unaware of a customer performing illegal activities it's one thing. That may even be a legal defense that works.

But, if you are aware of a customer using your service to perform illegal activities you can't claim plausible deniability.
Briefly started reading some of the NY Times article. Seems to me they may be exaggerating slightly and also possibly slightly misinterpreting how the Pornhub search engine works.

But it seems like AI may be able to help. Also it might really be necessary for uploaders to identify themselves because who really doubts that a small percentage of it is actually quite heinous?

Also if we really are concerned about the age of people in respect to laws then we probably need better ID systems and a way to tie that into AI and databases.
Don't forget, the Vatican just joined the Inclusive Capitalism club. Mastercard is one of many prominent members. I never expected them to actually mean what they said, but this could be the start of something... interesting.

https://www.inclusivecapitalism.com/organization/mastercard/
It's not our job to enforce Iran's or Saudi Arabia's sharia code. Nor is it a Canadian's job to enforce America's 2257 regime.
If true, isn't it essentially a recapitulation of Watergate, except that the break-in occurred online and not in a DC hotel? Watergate cost Nixon his presidency.

I was against impeachment (I still think it was stupid), because it was a political stunt with no hope of actually removing the president. But just morally, Trump richly deserved investigation. "Where's there's smoke, there's fire", and Trump's campaign and administration put out a burning oil well's worth of smoke. He lost his National Security Advisor to a foreign agent violation within weeks of taking over. Senior members of his campaign coordinated with Julian Assange. I don't think you can pretend like this was all fake.

(Just to calibrate: I also think Clinton should have been impeached).
> If someone made an application that downloaded web pages and executed the contents with SUDO privileges, would I be exploiting someone if my website was 'rm -rf --no-preserve-root /'?

Yes.
Well it's presented them with billionaire fortunes. That's a fact.

I think it's fine for entrepreneurs like them to work however much they want, but it's not cool to put that on employees, especially if they don't have any ownership in the company.

I don't buy the theory about poor relationships and long hours. I could see it going either way, especially if one was single and would otherwise spend their time at home watching tv or whatever.
This is how they stuck down wikileaks too. Stop the easy flow of money and they will go away.

I'd imagine some government friendly investor is already spinning up his own porn video site, or investing into competition.
I use chrome's devtools protocol, so I get a pipe to the browser that I can issue commands over. The token is sent to the browser via that; there is no URL on the command-line for other users to snoop via 'ps' or the task manager.
> bundleware can exist on android, especially on budget phones.

Have you bought a Samsung in the past 5 years? Literally filled to the brim with "Bundleware" and these are considered the top tier Android phones so I don't know what your are talking about. It's extremely pervasive.
Websites have been shut down for users uploading copyrighted materials. People have been hunted to the end of the earth (well, New Zealand) for it. And you're saying that law enforcement can't take legal action against child pornography or rape? That's ... bleak, troubling, and hopefully wrong.
PC VR, and even PlayStation VR (with many PSVR2 patents), is alive and well.
Kubernetes 1.20: Kubernetes Volume Snapshot Moves to GA
A company should comply with laws. Shutting off payments processing to possibly-illegal clients is a way to prevent potential litigation, which may result in high penalties. This is the corporate legal framework at work.

If you want a company to not have this option, you need to 1) absolve them of the responsibility to know their clients 2) prevent them from arbitrarily cutting off access. If you don't absolve them, it doesn't make sense to prevent them from cutting off access - how else can they comply with their legal responsibilities?
As a former App Engine PM who spent a lot of time with billing/quotas (though, not the one who deprecated this feature), it's likely due to some combination of:

- hard limits caused downtime more often than they prevent these blog posts

- hard limits were inconsistently enforced, even within GAE

- platform wide quota notifications were implemented (reached "GA"), leaving the question of "how a developer wants to handle this" to the developer, not the platform

- maintenance burden

The "I bankrupted my startup by running tests in an infinite loop" blog posts happen ~once a year, while the number of customers (including internal teams!) who inadvertently went down because of this quota was staggering. I feel like I used to see one a week, at least. Most often someone on the team was like "oh I'm going to turn this down to zero because we don't want to spend any money during development", never told anyone, and then they go live and they forgot to turn the knob back up (or didn't properly estimate traffic/costs and set it too low).

I can tell you it hurts revenue a lot more when a large customer goes down for 15 minutes due to quota issues and their usage drops to zero (both in terms of revenue and customer credibility) vs when tiny developer accidentally blows through 10k in a month and we refund it (since, obviously, the providers cost is a lot less than that).
I wish Signal didn't require a phone number, otherwise everything else about it is nice. I don't want to be required to have a phone number, let alone provide it to them.
> The whole normalisation of porn is not a net win for our civilisation.

Sources?

Also you seem to let's assume unintentionally mixing porn with its production modes, its ecosystem, all of its problems, plus the mental health problems of rich men, and so on.