skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not all forums engage in this type of moderation. In fact, most don’t. At some point, moderation turns you into a publisher. For example, book publishers generally work by receiving content from authors, deciding which works they would like to publish while rejecting others, and then using their distribution power to send it out to people around the world.

What part of that process is different from what Twitter is engaging in here?
Are you a Slav? With a background in Hungarian and German I don't have any difficulties with the articles.
I think it’s a cultural thing. Take France. My anecdotal experience is that the bourgeoisie seem to place a certain social capital on having a degree from the right school. Entrepreneurialism is something to be studied, not attempted. Hard to take a risk with that kind of social expectation.
I mean, you're using a site which self-selects for his target demographic. He's the founder of a VC company which created the site your visiting and apparently his blog gets 15 million page views per year. I think it's just a numbers game, not fandom.

I'm not defending what he writes, but this posts are generally fun to read and think about. Sometimes I don't agree with him or find holes in his arguments, but there's usually a nugget of truth you can take away. They're just blog posts, he doesn't need to be infallible.

The occasional self-promotion from the people running the site is a price I'm willing to pay to use the site.
Is this a tongue in cheek reference to Ken Thompson’s trick in “reflections on trusting trust”? [1] if so, it wins the 2020 award for originality in HN conspiracy theories!

1 - https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html
Because most likely it was more an issue of who wrote them than the quality of the GC.
Specifically: what happens when the social media companies start abusing this once it is accepted? What if they start discrediting those calling for antitrust, demergers, and breakups?

“This claim about big tech’s power is disputed.”
They challenged the validity of the election, and they failed. Yet they continue to insist on fighting a losing battle and possibly refusing to leave the White House.

That's called a coup attempt. A pathetic one, sure. But a coup attempt nonetheless.
I remember my gentoo days where I had to debug stuff from the console.

Browsing stackoverflow and forums with lynx is possible and saves you in situations when your graphics card drivers fail for some reason.
I work as a developer at https://www.odoo.com. Generally speaking, a professional software company has some kind of "style", "guideline" and "culture" that guides developers.

It's like building a house. Before you even start, you know you are going to need windows, walls, a roof... being a professional means having built so many houses that you know the order, the required components, how much time it should take and a hint of the cost.

So if you have models like orders, bills, partners, contacts, you probably have a class for each and it's going to be mapped to the database tables somehow. Ýou will need to display the data and make it editable. You carefully plan and then you make space for refactoring, maybe use methodologies like Agile to decide priorities.

Translate this into: authentication, authorization, data storage, algorithms, performance, user experience, import/export and ETL, documentation, tests, customer support, analytics.

If you also are into product, add to that product design, marketing, hiring, supervision...

If you are an expert, you may want to optimize, to make extensible components, to write a DSL, an API, to make collatersl services.

"Clean architecture" is a classic go-to book. You can have a look at the QT framework docs which are very good. This is a good starting link also.
https://queirozf.com/entries/how-to-structure-software-proje...
I think you might be conflating macro and micro. At the level of a single issue it can be effective if used sparingly.

The argument, as I understand it, is that frequent and continued use of these techniques over time lead to those issues.

Anecdotally I have had several conversations with younger, misguided men, that considered the suppression of holocaust denial information was proof that it never happened. In their logic, why would would some much effort be placed in suppressing this information if it was so obviously false.
Lots of this seems obviously wrong?

https://b4rn.org.uk/about-us/our-network/

B4RN is a pretty typical British rural broadband offer, in a rural area there's no real problem with just digging a trench, dropping the ducts into the trench, then blow fibre through a completed duct. In a city if you dig a trench that's a huge pain, because the city is paved or built on everywhere, but in rural areas it's no hassle. With modern agricultural practices a relatively shallow trench is enough that the fibre won't be disturbed by subsequent farming activity, these days nobody churns up half the planet to grow stuff because we know that destroying soil structure reduces long term productivity.

And as to those "network elements" it's GPON, the elements are passive splitters, basically a fancy prism, completely passive. There's only bit of actual electronics in each region but it's quite a bit fancier than a "gigabit switch" because it's multiplexing the light for all the nodes behind the GPON splitters.
also someone tell them about curl
It is shocking to me that some people actually prefer to rely on "fact checkers," as if those people are somehow more intelligent, and less biased than the readers themselves.

In fact, the idea that someone could check these facts for you, almost explicitly stipulates that you, the reader, are somehow less capable. But we are not talking about changing oil in the car, or doing brain surgery, we are talking about maybe the only thing that each individual can do on their own, unsupervised, to the beset of their ability - use their brain.

This is not going to end well.
Yes, but a large proportion of a streamers viewers will just spend their time watching another streamer.

We have our favourites but there’s always a second best that I’d spend my time watching.
>The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

People need to stop and consider the meaning of that phrase and how it applies in the modern day. People don't seem to care that we're making "lies" a justifiable basis for censorship. Whether you believe Trump is lying or not, we are accepting and normalizing the existence of a third party that censors things deemed to be "lies" for the greater good.

What's more, is that it being defended under the guise of "well, they're a private corporation, etc etc." Yes, and they do have the right, but that is orthogonal to the fact that we are normalizing and welcoming it. Twitter having the right to do it and we as a society supporting their actions are separate from each other. But people like to muddy the waters by claiming that it isn't "censorship" because it's a private corporation. But it is censorship on their platform, and again, the support for the censorship in general is the disturbing part. It's not as if the people supporting Twitter's actions are saying "we should only censor people on Twitter"...they want it everywhere that there is a platform.

There's also voices that say "well, it's Trump, and he is the President, so there should be an exception because he can influence a lot of people." Taylor Swift has as many followers (~88M) on Twitter. Do you think if she started saying similar things as Trump, people wouldn't be calling for her censorship too? Can Taylor Swift start a civil war as easy as Trump can? Probably not, but who makes the determination of "you are censored because we believe people will listen to you" ?

Controversial speech only seem to be acceptable so long as nobody listens to you. Is that what we want?
Trust is something that is defined and measurable. And yes you’re right, it is complicated. But the complexity isn’t helped by introducing a random thing called “earnestness” without a way to measure that.
There seems to be a relatively large covid-denial movement in the Netherlands compared to the rest of Europe, and focussed on The Hague in particular. The administrative capital is a good place to protest when the whole country is around an hour by train.

But, the politics is quite different from the US. Some restaurant and bar owners threatened to stage a protest and re-open against the law, giving six weeks notice that they might do this. This has since been defused.

https://nltimes.nl/2020/12/02/restaurants-bars-defy-dutch-ba...
Node.js implementation of Unix tail command
There's nothing wrong with it, it can simply lead to confusion. When computers started, people called them 'thinking machines' and, say, multiplication was something that required some intelligent behavior on the part of the person doing it. There's nothing wrong with calling a calculator a thinking machine that implements intelligent behavior, but it helps if everyone is aware that at other times when people talk about 'thinking' and 'intelligent' they mean something quite different. This is not uncommon; when people use the word 'bank' they refer to very different things: river ones, park ones, central ones, rotations of flying objects etc. But everyone should be aware that getting better at building comfortable banks to sit on in the park is not the same as getting better at figuring out the optimal rate of interest or turning planes. It certainly might, but that is a separate argument and terminology can obscure that.
> educate people to develop critical reading and identify when they are being lied to

All we need to see are nationwide initiatives being planned, funded and executed broadly across education channels.

Could you provide some references that indicate this is happening? Or at least beginning to happen? Is this a viable proposed solution, or is it rather a theoretical or philosophical alternative to real solutions to the mass misinformation crisis?
>Its referring to herbicide-resistant GMO crops where the pesticides are Roundup or Liberty.

Roundup (aka glyphosate) seems to be pretty safe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate#Glyphosate_alone

>With regard to Bt, there's a big difference between topical application of Bt and GMO Bt corn (where the Bt is produced inside the plant so bugs are poisoned by the plant).

Why would there be? The wikipedia article I linked mentioned ingestion testing. It's not like they tested bt as a regular spray on pesticide, found it was safe, then approved bt gmo corn without further testing.

>Since the biosphere has a lot of bimolecular pathways its not possible to categorically test everything and catalog all the possible reactions, we just know we can limit the amount of unwanted reactions by using the minimum amount of pesticide. [...] Its an application of the precautionary principle where we act in such a manner to create the least possibility of harm because the scope and extent of the effects are not known.

But the scope and extent of the effects are not known. Glyphosate and bt have both been thoroughly studied. With your "precautionary principle" we'd all be not eating chocolate right now if it was first used as a pesticide (chocolate kills dogs, so if dogs were somehow a pest, it can be used as a pesticide against them).

>They aren't in opposition because mutations don't stop when you start polluting the gene pool with GMO products.

So mutations are intrinsically bad? In other words, if there were some way to stop naturally occurring mutations globally, you'd support it?

>Yes its a problem for the farmers because they can no longer rely on the herbicide to control those competitor organisms, which was the entire point of using a selective herbicide / GMO crop system.

It's a problem, but the alternative (not using any GMO/herbicide) is worst, since the weeds will still be growing out of control. At least if you used GMO/herbicide you have a few decades of weed-free growth.

>With regard to the ecosystem disruption due to pesticide runoff, its an issue for anyone who is dependent on the biosphere because of the harmful effects on biodiversity.

This is totally orthogonal to the discussion of GMOs. If you're worried about pesticide/herbicide run-off from farms, then you'd want to regulate it directly, rather than trying to regulate it by proxy by limiting access to technology that allows for greater pesticide/herbicide use. It's not like the threshold where herbicide levels tolerated by non-gmo crops is the same threshold that ecosystem damage occurs. Not to mention, non-gmo crops can still have their herbicide resistance raised by selective breeding.
Unlimited Is a Ponzi Scheme
Hi, I made this map/visual diagram of the web's APIs. One of the interesting things you can see is the emerging technologies, like CSS Houdini (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Houdini). Another is alternative and less popular technologies, like XSLT for styling (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/XSLT) or SVG as a markup language. (https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/)

It helps people understand the capabilities of a modern web browser easier.

The color-coding is intended to help web developers think on if they can use as a feature on their site. If your audience is on a modern web browser (not IE 11), the medium shade of green is enough. If you only need some users to have the feature, then dark green is enough. If you only care about Chrome, you can use the APIs in blue.
> They are either a publisher or a platform. There is no in between.

In the print world there is an in between: distributors, such as bookstores, newsstands, and libraries.

They do not become liable for false claims in books they sell. It is the authors or publishers of those books who are liable. If the bookstore itself produced libelous material, such as in a press release, they would be liable for that.
I don't think that you can stick to philosophical principles because those tend to be too simplistic and real life is messy.
Twitter as a private entity should in theory have the right to do whatever they want. OTOH, their platform gives them influence over the democratic process. In theory people shouldn't be censored. OTOH it is easy to fool people with targeted propaganda.

Philosophizing is not going to get you anywhere, really. It's a technique of the past. There are many competing effects at play here. I think the more rational approach is to actually study the real world system to find a policy optimum that achieves a set goal. Philosophy should be relegated to figuring out that goal e.g. should it be democracy over all else or maybe individual rights or something else.
It’s a joke.

See here for more https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke
Virus Avoidance Is Not the Whole of Life – AIER
You clearly have never used a modern IDE.
Nonsense. Targeted censorship has the exact effect of taking the steam out of nonsensical conspiracy theories because you stop the spread of incorrect ideas.
> I don't understand - how is using a debugger a waste of time?

The debugger may help you understand, at some moment in time, what an unclear piece of code does. When you revisit this piece of code later, or another person finds it, your first experience with the debugger is not remembered, thus lost. This is what I meant. On the contrary, if you clarify the code and make it easier to instrumentate (by adding assertions, tests, comments, logging, etc.), it helps you right now, you in the future, and everybody else at any time. Furthermore, as a result of these efforts you will create a code that is clearer and nobody will ever need to debug to understand what it does.

The only case where debugging makes sense to me is for cases that are difficult to add instrumentation to, like assembly programming, where it will be somewhat inevitable that you need to step through the instructions to see what's going on.
I simply can’t see how this can be right.

What we know about PG’s experience is a huge prior that shapes how we interpret what he writes.

I think this probably explains some of the polarization we see in the comments - people who don’t know who he is see this as just a dumb blog post that seems to be getting too much karma. People who do, see it as insight from someone who is in a position to actually know something.
> The fact that you don't consider ants as general intelligences means you agree that we aren't making progress towards general intelligences, since ants intelligence is way closer to general intelligence than any computer program we have.

Please don't argue like this. It's your job to explain what you think is true, and my job to explain what I think is true. Up to this point in this conversation I explicitly haven't taken a stance about how generally intelligent our best AI are, because it's pointless to argue that until the epistemics are valid. In fact I didn't intend to argue past that point at all; I'm objecting to bad arguments, not the position per se.

> The way we do AI can never achieve that

This is not meaningfully true. We have unsupervised image recognition, for example, and there's plenty of work on all sort other unsupervised learning of all sorts of things.

The idea that insects ‘don't have a reward function’ is not really valid; a reward function is just the function you're optimizing on.
"Conclusions and Relevance In this preliminary study of adult outpatients with symptomatic COVID-19, patients treated with fluvoxamine, compared with placebo, had a lower likelihood of clinical deterioration over 15 days. However, the study is limited by a small sample size and short follow-up duration, and determination of clinical efficacy would require larger randomized trials with more definitive outcome measures."
No, they are challenging the validity of the election and have so far failed. This is an ongoing process. You don't get to declare it a one-and-done just because you don't like that it's happening.
I enjoy reading his posts, but I'm not really representative of the prototypical HN reader.

I do think they get more attention than ones written by others, but, hey; it's his baby, so it's not surprising that they go so well.

For myself, I have always practiced Honor, Integrity, Honesty and Earnestness. Has nothing to do with business. It's a personal philosophy.

It did me well, when I worked for a Japanese company, but tends to elicit scorn, when dealing with Americans.
That's pretty a pretty cool trick! Thank you for sharing this!
Of course it is abusable. The state has done all sorts of tremendously evil things when wielding its power. "Free speech" has never stopped the crushing of legitimate protest. This is not a surprise to leftist activists, who have been consistently violently attacked by the state for more than a century. I find these arguments so disingenuous when people throw them out while also doing little to nothing to curb existing state abuse. I've never seen right wing "free speech absolutists" at trans-rights protests or fighting against state interference in left-coded academic work.

General restrictions on state power don't work. Capitalism crushes people. When that state power turns on the majority, the majority complains that their voices are silenced and then they go right back to ignoring the continued problems of the minority.

Perhaps the solution is to approach each situation on a case by case process. Protest and agitate when the state harms people and celebrate when the state protects people. Make harm reduction the goal.

In software people often point to how focusing on metrics can make you fail to achieve your true goal. Similarly, we should focus on the thing that free speech is intending to achieve rather than free speech itself.
The Be Book in Lovely HTML
What happens then is that the full power of government would be in the hands of the democrats, likely including the power to impeach and remove members of the Supreme Court they don't like. If they control enough state legislatures they get to amend the constitution as they see fit also.

There is no prospect of a rebellion overcoming the US military machine, and its presence would allow the GOP to be purged and suppressed. Maintaining a low level of guerilla activity would allow this to continue.

The GOP is playing a very dangerous game for themselves moving in this direction.
> Why would you want to game metrics that honestly can help improve your business outcome?

Q: If your manager imposed OKRs/KPIs on your team, especially if there were a financial incentive linked to achieving "results"/"performance indicators", how would you feel?

Note that what is good for the business may or may not have much to do - at least in the short to medium term - with what is good for the employees.
PG says “the most earnest part of Europe is Scandinavia [and therefore it has more successful startups]”. Afaict GP is saying PG doesn’t believe what he is saying and is disingenuously suggesting causality just to support his main thesis.
Nietzche wasn’t crazy, but his whole philosophy is an appeal to irrationalism and obscuring the truth revealed by Christianity: social orders built on sacrifice of an “other” are little more than a collective crime we engage in to tell lies about ourselves, society, and defuse collective tensions. His intent was to build a philosophy that would reconstruct the veil of archaic orders that obscured these truths, justifying a return to a sacrificial systems within the context of modernity.

This is evident before his death, where he was obsessed with the problem of Dionysus versus the example of Christ, ultimately recognizing that they were the same figure, but conjugated toward a lie (creation of a false divine through ritual violence) or the truth (a victim of collective irrationality, for which it is our duty to transcend):

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2905504?seq=1
The offer is still open, do not hesitate to send me your address (wherever in the world!) by email as explained on the web page :).
Given the russia hoax, the ukraine hoax, the pretend-the-hunter-biden-laptop-is-russian-disinformation hoax only the willfully ignorant would trust anything that comes out of mainstream journalism these days. They have an agenda and they're buddies with big tech.

It's going to be quite something to see if twitter/facebook/google can create a digital ghetto for half the country.