skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yep. I was just trying to discuss with another user on this site who seriously claimed all conservatives have been banned from Twitter. I proposed a smorgasbord of conservatives who haven’t been banned—George Bush (mainstream neoconservative), the Koch brothers (business libertarians or paleoconservatives), Ron Paul (moderate libertarian).

Their response was that none of these were “true conservatives”. Their proof was an article by the Cato Institute (brainchild of the Koch brothers, ironically) saying Bush was not a conservative. Well, duh, that’s my point. A wide variety of conservatives with distinct ideologies have not been banned.

None of these people have been banned. Why? Well they aren’t creating mobs who storm the Capitol chanting that they want to lynch Mike Pence.

Claiming Twitter is banning conservatives is flat out wrong. Twitter is banning terrorists who assaulted our Capitol.
The question at issue here is whether RFE/RFA's reporting is known to be reputable. As far as I can tell, it is. (Funding a reputable journalistic organization is entirely consistent with "broadcasting the benefits of freedom", and doing the opposite would probably undermine those goals.)

The person who started this thread is trying to discount an RFA report solely because of the source. That seems unwarranted.
> in a lot of ways it is more capitalist than a lot of the West

China definitely has big market aspects and private ownership, but I also think this can be overstated.

There is still massive public ownership of major companies and banks in China and land in all urban areas is publicly owned as well.
There is a huge difference between a platform censoring/banning you and a community on the platform censoring/banning you. No irony involved. That subreddit is just trying to have discussion among like minded people without trolls and brigaders disrupting everything, they are a highly targeted subreddit for those acts. Reddit as a platform still exists for you and joining or making new communities is possible at the click of a button. Contrast that with having to create your own platform which is prohibitive, or migrating to another platform (if one even exists), which is also prohibitive.

And now we have a most recent grievance of a group getting removed from all platforms, creating their own platform, only for it to be removed from existence by mobile devices and web infrastructure dropping it.
I spent way too large a portion of my last position teaching developers about indexes, query plans and underlying join types and their impact on performance and memory consumption.
> What I find troubling is that despite containing the same cesspool of vile content, Twitter never got booted from Google and Apple App stores, and AWS.

The difference being that on Parler the 'cesspool' as you call it is all there is, or at least it is the main attraction.

On Twitter it is easy enough to find, but an average user mostly does have to go looking for it, or at least be following someone who goes looking for it. Twitter also does make efforts to drain the cesspool, although it can certainly be debated whether those efforts are sufficient or even being made in good faith.
From screenwriting POV, it is well written and executed (so far ep.6), based on screenplay elements.

8.1 on imdb: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt12867810/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

Details to pay attention:

1. Premise- 1st 15 minute hook:
Money & image, vs. family. Two philosophy fights: Truth vs. lie. Establishes the motivations of main characters in beginning.

2. Characters- Persona representations of real world roles were well researched:

The father who risks family stability/corporate unhappiness to pursue a startup, the orphan who became angel/VC investor, rich/connected vs. poor/bootstrap founder, the math genius AI founder, the looked-down high schooler/univ. dropout CEO, trend-spotting quality of a CEO, the perpetual deceived contract worker in a corporation due to lack of qualifications, the stuck-up ivy-league, the underdog coders vs MIT engineers, the startup accelerator (even has Y combinator colors)

3. Jargon- Series is nice enough to explain the common terms for viewers non-technically (if they chose to learn): cold-call, investment round, angel, keyman, hackathon, bug, due diligence, startup/friends/family analogy, machine learning, AI, etc. Some not explained: burn-rate, conversion rate, ANN, loss function, ransomware...

4. Hyped elements- also common on startup world:
“Follow your dreams”, “change the world”, anyone can try without education/skills mentality. Possible but not the norm, low probability
Exactly, and weeks after the story broke, it was revealed the FBI was actively investigating Hunter Biden.

You can also download all the uncensored photos on many leak websites. The photos are clearly Hunter Biden in many sexually explicit positions (although none of them appear to be underage as was suggested by some).

I think there is a prima fascia case against Hunter for his ties to Burisma and his appointment being purely for political clout and a power move; a move that should be investigated for possible direct security risks to the American government and the American people.
I think the author is over-simplifying here a deal.

Page 99 here.
https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/1000/MA1902/en_US/app...

Which describes that the private keys are generated and held on device.

Now I think this model *may change when you enable icloud messaging, in which case an encrypted messaging key may be stored in your icloud account. So you may opt to have apple store it, but in an encrypted manner that they can't undo.
This part is a bit speculative on my part though, so grain of salt.
I have to. But in this case it's not a social network, I don't care if the rest of world uses WhatsApp. I don't need a "network effect". I am fine when the people around me use it. So I achieved my personal goal and while I am happy if more people will join, it will not impact my own usage.
Guo Wengui said back in September 2019 that "Jack Ma would be jailed or killed" on Kyle Bass's youtube channel. [1]

At this point its not even a question of whether we will see Jack Ma in public again. Overnight he went from billionaire to peasantry. We've seen dozen cases like this:

1) Billionaire disappears or is "killed"

2) Billionaire's company becomes nationalized

3) Rinse & Repeat

Everybody who isn't familiar with the inner workings of the CCP thinks that Jack Ma openly challenged the CCP. That simply isn't the case. They are using as an excuse to take over the company because they can.

As much as people in the West praise CCP's economic rise, and some even point to its authoritarian system as superior to our democracy, but little do they know the very laws that protect them isn't an option in China.

Imagine spending most of your life building a massive business and then one day it is taken from you by force by an authoritarian ruler.

This is why anyone that has money send their kids abroad and move permanently to a Western country that their kids despise and criticize their host for calling out the CCP.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtJK_5qDraM
Yeah, I suppose. I kinda think that distributed SQL is a mostly commoditised space, and wondered what replaced Spark for distributed training.

For context, I'm a DS who's spent far too much time not being able to run useful models because of hardware limitations, and a Spark cluster is incredibly good for that.

Additionally, I'd argue in favour of Spark even for ETL, as the ability to write (and test!) complicated SQL queries in R, Python and Scala was super, super transformative.

We don't really use Spark at my current place, and every time I write Snowflake (which is great, to be fair), I'm reminded of the inherent limitations of SQL and how wonderful Spark SQL was.

I'm weird though, to be fair.
It's not like this was some innocent small service that suddenly got taken over. Parler was built by Trump supporters for Trump supporters.
Alt-Right Pseudoscience – Part 1: Lockdown Sceptics
Where there's a will, there's a way. I don't believe everyone is guaranteed easy IT as a basic human right. Buy some servers. Or just setup a proxy so no one knows where the actual servers are and when one isp shuts you down you can move as fast as dns can update.

Then, of course, the domain name company may come after you. But you can also use a direct ip address. I don't think domain names are a basic human right either.
They were running all of their websites through AWS, but didn't use AWS as the registrar.
Your last point isn’t a truism as networks approach global scale. Early users of Facebook and Twitter have not set the tone - they may have influenced it, but particularly in Facebooks cause, any such influence has been largely diluted away.
Free speech in the form of non-violent speech is not free on the various platforms as they say they are.

This is mostly targeted at users with a larger following...

As as example if you have a diff opinion, or say something then you might get suspended or banned. Even so when others on the platform are more violent, and encouraging violent acts. Look at twitter accounts of Iran, China, and all the accounts for antifa for example. They use twitter to cause and incite violence, yet they remain.

A few come to mind phrases come to mind that may get you banned on FB/Twitter:

“#Hydroxychloroquine is a safe drug.
"Eric Ciaramella"
I don't know whether that's true or false but I also don't know why it matters. Absent a confidentiality clause AWS is free to publish whatever they want. Certainly, people routinely publish their private communications with AWS.
I suppose there would be some regulatory agency that takes samples and estimates the number of items disposed, and then levies the costs?
My man, the site (parler) is literally used by people who believe the lies that the election is stolen, who want to hang mike pence, who want to go to the capitol with guns and kill the elected representatives. It failed to moderate content that incites violence and was literally build to attract extremists who are on that platform to plot violent acts.

There's a reason it got shut down by everyone.

Get your head out of your ass.
Or maybe he always put politics first and people just didn't notice
/r/conservative moderates their platform to accept all types of conservatives, including the authoritarian "let's spend all our money on the military and censor everything we don't like" types.

They also took in an massive influx of new users after the_donald was banned which permanently changed its discourse.

And as the biggest right-leaning political subreddit, r/conservative also took in an influx of people posting death threats and insults due to its visibility. Examples are occasionally screenshotted by the moderators, and I'm not surprised they moved to 'flaired users only' to keep up with moderation.

Smaller government, free-speech conservatives on Reddit tend to hang out in more libertarian subreddits.
Is there a GitHub issue or someone to make this as a feature request for Signal since it's an open source project? +1 to easy migration features that can allow folks and groups to move from WhatsApp to Signal.
iMessage does store a secure key locally on your device which never leaves. The main difference with iMessage is Apple is able to add more signing keys to decrypt the data if they wanted. This is what happens when you add a new device.

In a no-trust model once you sign in on a new device you wouldn't see all of your old messages. Because all of your old messages are decrypted and sent to the new device this is evidence that a new signing key was added to the communication chain.

Apple could also do this to decrypt your messages to give to a government agency or for whatever purposes they want without notifying you.

https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/27/apple-explains-exactly-how...
I think they are saying that Ma couldn't keep up.
> Twitter on Friday shut down Trump's account to prevent another attack on the Capitol building.

Twitter has a false sense of importance if they think that what they do has any impact on national defense
That’s quite the straw man. We should separate an issue of moderation and actual motives of the platform itself.

Did the platform have algorithms to make pro-capital storming posts ascend higher than other equally engaged posts?

Did the owner/company make a call to violence?

Did their platform spike in popularity in such a short time frame, they were unable to moderate to the same degree as other platforms? (Even Google struggles with YT moderation, though I understand the volume of content is widely different)

It’s obvious there exist political ties to this. Sure, have Parler respond to a congressional hearing just as other tech companies have had to do. But removing them from all these services overnight, albeit technically legal (so far), reeks of anti trust.

No matter political affiliation, the antitrust precedent set, if unpunished, will pave the way for greater censorship.

This seems like a similar level to price fixing - multiple companies, competing even, coordinating to cancel competition.

This is a new issue we have in the digital age. It should be handled in the Supreme Court.
Serious question: How does one get educated about modern China? (I'm Chinese but mostly Western educated)

Having seen my grandparents/parents/relatives escaping communist China and now my generation escaping HK, it has heavily influenced me on how even people who identified as Chinese and hoping for democracy and freedom for their own cousins in China are being played and lied to for multiple decades.

My people in HK are screaming that the West previous engagement policies have proven again and again to be ineffective. It's believed that the only way is to "distrust and verify" and not kowtow to their ways like what the West had been doing for the previous decades.

I do not claim to know everything about how the Chinese system functions and can only observe how my immediate network is being oppressed but still hope that there's a way to engage the CCP if at all possible.
The thought was that billionaires would push for freedom and liberty (like Jack Ma).

The CCP will not be opposed.
Yeah it's crazy how much worse call quality has become relative to landlines. It's so bad that it's a borderline accessibility issue at this point. Would be interesting to know what public input there is when it comes to bandwidth optimization. There also isn't a good quantitative metric for measuring call quality in a way that could spur competition between carriers. It seems to mostly be a race to the bottom.
Do you have an argument that would be persuasive to people who don't believe that coordinated efforts to eliminate CSAM constitute antitrust violations?
Yes, use tools that are specifically designed for censorship-resistance like Tor, Freenet or I2P.

If you ensure that nobody knows who hosts your servers, you can even continue to host them at the big cloud providers.
Yes, and then they will also need to be more transparent about pricing, and ensure equal access. Good things all around.

Sewer used to be a luxury, now it's a utility.
Water used to be a luxury, now it's a utility.
Natural gas used to be a luxury, now it's a utility.
Electricity used to be a luxury, now it's a utility.

It's time for network access to also be a utility.
I don't know but this is obviously coordinated, so someone does, and that person or group has too much power.
Visual behavior modelling for robotic theory of mind
7.2 B ii). We may also terminate this Agreement immediately upon notice to you (A) for cause if we have the right to suspend under Section 6
You're citing a news article from 1977 as your counterpoint?
So, it's not money they're counting on. If they lose it, it won't collapse their life.

There's a difference between "would like to not lose" and "can't lose". I would like to not lose my investments. I can't lose rent.
https://youtu.be/sAMotY8CJkQ

(6 views at time of posting it here)
Google and Facebook already have documented ability to rig elections, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_manipulation_eff...

Politicians, including the incoming regime, are at their mercy and ought to be careful not to step on any toes.
So much for Greenwald's case.
Please update title, its incorrect
My mum and dad (in their 60s) asked us to move from WhatsApp. They did all the work (setting up the groups and everything). I just chatted.
I commented this recently on a similar post a few months ago, but it's relevant here (lightly edited for accuracy).

Even now you see comments in this thread pretending it was succumbing to depression rather than admit our responsibility and the immense pressure that was placed on him - supremely irritating.

###

I remember seeing later that his legal defense fund was posted here for help because the cost of the defense for a federal crime (even though he’d likely win) was 1.5M, and the first comment at the time was someone being nasty to him. (post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529484 , comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529609)

I remember the emails from MIT that showed the IT department going after him, and then when caught MIT choosing to do nothing rather than help.

Even JSTOR backed down rather than move forward.

It still makes me angry and MIT’s reputation was seriously harmed in my eyes because of it.

Journals blocking access to publicly funded research by extorting desperate academics for prestige is what’s wrong. It’s a broken system due to bad incentives that’s worse for everyone except the journals that enrich themselves on the back of publicly funded research, by locking it away and charging enormous rent.

The punishment was disproportionate to a crime that, while possibly illegal, was on the morally right side of a broken incentive structure. He didn’t even get the chance to put the articles up, he downloaded them from a network he had rightful access to. His main crime was leaving a laptop running in an open closet, and downloading more than they wanted.

Luckily Sci-Hub continued his work.

The legal thing and the right thing are often not the same: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/13/zoom-in-china.html

Maybe the worst part was after his suicide reading comments here about how you can only blame the person who committed suicide since no one else is responsible for the ultimate act.

If you choose not to see a causal link between the pressure of this prosecution and his death, I think that says more about your own motivated reasoning than it does about reality.

This was a failure of our community.

###

On a meta note, one thing that bothered me about 'The Internet's Own Boy' were his interviews on Russia Today. He didn't understand the extent to which he was being used by foreign adversaries to push a narrative favorable to them. That doesn't mean his arguments are wrong, but they're in a quite misleading context. If you go on RT you should do it like Yascha Mounk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cucX1IO78lM

In hindsight, wikileaks was more an arm of Russian propaganda than Aaron understood.
Go with third-party repair. It's cheap and fast.
That's a good point, and also I've seen comments here praising the "Arab Spring" years after it killed many millions of people (in Syria, Libya, etc.).
As far as posting online, people aren't allowed to post child porn - anywhere. You don't get to complain about your free speech, or about hosting companies not hosting your child porn.

In this case, it looks like they also don't want to host your death threats.

There was no line to begin with. Nothing was crossed. This isn't anything new.
You have to understand things in context though. Trump never said "storm the US capitol". Twitter's official reason for banning him was for glorifying violence by tweeting that “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” and that he wouldn't be going to the inauguration.

If you can twist that into supporting the rioters and calling for violence at the inauguration, I don't see how you can't see calling for the destruction of Israel could cause people to be anti-Semitic.

If Trump tweeted that Mexico was cancerous tumor on America that has to be removed and eradicated, it is possible, and it will happen, do you think Twitter be cool with that? What if he had previously endorsed the genocide of all Mexican people? What if Americans had commonly been committing terrorist attacks against Mexicans?
Would you mind sharing the link you tried with? It could help me out. Thanks.
Sorry about that! Should be working now.

Here's something I never thought I'd say: Perl made breaking changes. My guess is additional strict things broke the gitweb CGI script (which was hopelessly out of date anyway).
You just invented Reddit. The same thing will always happen: you say "communities should moderate themselves" and then you get "communities" that scream that 'libtards' need to be murdered, etc etc etc.. So then what?

Wash, rinse, repeat.
Xi Jinping Is Undoing China's Economic Miracle
Yup, when you get bosses dictating algorithms such bugs are likely.
Of course, I was responding to the sentiment of "You can't discuss conservative views on (platform x)!" which is generally untrue.
What we have learned after 6 years of deplatforming ISIS
That’s literally the definition of propaganda.

Why is it so difficult for Americans to believe that the US engages in a war of propaganda against countries it labels as “adversaries”? [1]

[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-...
Because AWS decided it was. It's really that basic. I think gay people should be able to get wedding cakes from literally any baker as a protected class, but the law disagrees with me. The end, unless new laws are passed.

Parler is not a protected class, their users posts are not protected speech. The only leg they will have to stand on is the terms of their AWS contract, which AWS will likely have had lawyers craft with steel vault level protections to shield the company from liability in cases like this. It would be shocking if Parler wins this injunction (and based on time sensitivity, we'll probably find out later today) but even if they do long term they're going to have to build/buy new server structure.
Xi Jinping played his hand early.

They needed a slow burn to achieve world domination, but he's much too eager.
I'm for free speech, but Parler is demonstrably against it. The aggressively ban users for ideological reasons. That doesn't impact my feelings on speech and I support it without exception. What it does impact is how I prioritize Parler's issues. Groups other than the American right face far worse probabilities of being arrested and charged for frivolous reasons. I will worry about them first. I only have finite time and resources.
Inspired by kombucha tea, engineers create “living materials”
Career Planning Guide for People in the Technology Industry – Breakout List