skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> sentient robots within a matter of decades

There's no reason to believe this. We've made zero progress on sentient machines in the preceding decades. Hell, we've made zero progress on knowing what sentience even means.
> but the really important part of the puzzle is the advertiser network

If your main goal is "How can I make money?" then maybe. And that's one of the huge reasons that YouTube is the mess that it is.

For the rest of us, this is not important at all. In fact, I am happy that there is no advertiser network whatsoever. if I put something on the web, I do not do it because I expect compensation. I am not alone in this sentiment.
It looks like you've been using HN primarily for political battle, or at least getting uncomfortably close to it. That's not allowed here—it destroys the curious conversation that this site is supposed to exist for. When accounts cross that line (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for more explanation), that's when we start banning them, regardless of which politics or ideology they're banning for.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site for its intended purpose—especially now, as seemingly everything descends into the hell realms—we'd be grateful.
> is your position that there needs to be due process for the author to remove the comment?
> That’s not how freedom of speech works.

Judge can definitely order you to remove the comment.

Also, an author's blog is not a popular communication channel like Twitter.

Yes, I'm asking for a proper process of removing an elected leader from an important communication channel like Twitter.
>but we'll get close enough that a stable "red social media" ecosystem will emerge that's out of reach of cancellation

No it won't, because that platform already exists: Twitter. I follow lots of conservatives on Twitter who have no need to ditch the platform, because they actually are decent humans who don't promote racism, unhinged conspiracy theories, violence and sedition. All of those things are now confirmed as losing strategies for the party; businesses doubling down on a losing strategy will fail. This idea, that a certain person's particular brand of bad faith trolling represents all of republicanism, is senseless and divisive and it needs to stop. Retreating into a bubble with this attitude is going to be even more destructive for the republican party and make it even more vulnerable to getting hoodwinked by these bullshit salesmen. (Disclaimer: I don't personally belong to any political parties)
To the greater point of "insects," I was a child in the 80s. A road trip (driving in unpopulated areas) resulted in tons of bugs smacking the windshield, reducing visibility. That's much reduced.
Yes, by abolishing policing, you can reappropriate those funds for other projects. This is literally what he's saying. It is literally reappropriating the funds.
The EFF has held this position for quite some time. They think the existing laws are just fine and oppose the idea that additional regulation would be meaningful in compelling companies to do the right thing. Instead, they worked with other activist organizations to create The Santa Clara Principles. [0]

The chief problem is that enforcement will always be unequal, especially when the majority of people in positions of authority come from one political culture. The EFF thinks it's just fine to deal with this retroactively, but basically, that's saying it's okay to sacrifice a few to save the many. I'm okay with saying that if you're okay with making the consequences for sacrificing those few huge. eg: If Facebook disables someones account because they misunderstood some context because they don't have people working there that can properly frame it, then Facebook owes them substantial damages.

[0] https://santaclaraprinciples.org/
>You just can’t have hate speech against protected classes

"hate" speech is fully protected by the US constitution. Though I have to ask where you got the idea that in a world where it's ok to ban hate speech the powers that be somehow decided to only ban it in the case of protected classes? What a strange morality.
Hmmm...name me one country where it’s less restrictive than the US. People really take the freedom afforded in the US for granted.
Curated list of awesome React Native components and libraries
That is some pretty twisted logic you have there. This same ass-backwards logic is being used by some now to blame Joe Biden for the Capitol Riot. How dare Biden have won the election, he should have let trump win to prevent Trumps violent mob from sacking the Capitol Building.

No one should give in to the violent, hateful, irrational and seditious mob of Trump supporting Fascist thugs that are increasingly making up more and more of the right wing. They need to be crushed politically and shoved back into their basements. Capitulating to these Fascist thugs even in the slightest has shown that it will only lead to them being emboldened and pushing further and further into Authoritarianism. They don't care about Democracy or Rule of Law, only forcing their views on the rest of society violently!
Because they were paid to?

I'm not sure what you are trying to imply. Yes, they were going to have to present evidence. They didn't have any, and that's also why they didn't actually allege fraud. And that is why the cases were thrown out.

If you're asking why anyone paid them to file unwinnable cases: So there would be lawsuits to point to, and for the (minuscule) opportunity to have a (Trump-appointed) judge create some kind of win (again to point to it).
I'm sorry but it's not consistent with protecting digital rights.

This is not the same EFF that supported the Freedom of Speech stance by Apple against the FBI when terrorists killed 16 people in San Bernardino.

Below a poster liked a response by the ACLU which is a much better response to Freedom of Speech than that by the EFF. The EFF caved. They abandoned their one and only mission to promote freedom of speech.
You're totally right, 100% bad reading on my part. Sorry. I'll reply again with a fresh comment.
https://www.sentropy.com/ is a startup that appears to be doing this
You can change gender. And of course you can change sexual orientation, it's just preference.
The federal law enforcement currently in control by a seditious and insurrectionist president?
I find it hard to imagine that anyone, let alone Tr*p and his coterie, can just spin up an engaging social media platform in short order, especially if they can’t be hosted on well known cloud infrastructure.

Additionally even if he does somehow succeed, it seems unlikely that this platform would get any kind of traction beyon his most fervent supporters. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are great because people are on the platform for other reasons. Not so much for a dedicated site.
I think the argument being made here is that Parler doesn't care as much as Facebook about bad things happening.
It's far too early to discuss "precedent" when there's literally no precedent for a lame-duck President inciting an insurrection against the legislature for certifying his loss in this country.

I'll get concerned the second time it happens. But these are extraordinary circumstances.
This is why telecommunications companies sign decades long leases at colo facilities. Because everyone who's worked at 111 eighth avenue knows what happens when big tech wants you out. There's no lease for cloud infrastructure and I don't know what collective psychosis made operations folks think that's a good idea. Was Amazon even obliged to give them 24-hours on the eviction notice? That sounds like just enough time for a small company to make sure they have an offline copy of the database. What was stopping Amazon from pushing a button that instantly deleted their ec2 virtual machines and then recalled their s3 glacier offsite tape backups for shredding too. This is a great reminder that even if you do all the "right things" in the cloud, it can all be taken away in a day because Ro Khanna tweeted at your provider. Western Union was destroyed for far less meddling and scheming than this and AT&T rose to power on the explicit promise to not do basically everything the tech giants have done these past two days, so maybe we'll see some disruption in the future.
Possibly. He probably doesn't want calls for violence on his platform either, though.
I think Vivaldi is js/react shop right now. They have problems anytime a bug in native code pops up, like video codecs. Windows 7 video decoding has been partially broken for 3 years now with no fixes in sight, Big Sur video decoding is also broken. Chromium was a safe bet, and js lets them iterate fast, but the quality of code in their Web UI leaves a lot to be desired. Still, they are the only game in town when it comes to browsers you can just inject your code to change UI on the fly, modding it to your heart content. As a bonus they have no problem ripping out all of Google tracking/spying code.

My biggest problem with Vivaldi is the interface between developers and users. They have no QA to speak of (repeatedly reintroducing same bugs, claiming to fix something while its not fixed, introducing trivial bugs with new features, failing to reproduce most bugs), most likely no automated unit testing, and no public accessible bug tracking system.

The way you report bugs is, I shit you not:

- fill out a form

- receive random number

- receive single automated confirmation

- post in obscure thread on their forum to ask for some Vivaldi employee to MANUALLY check what is happening with said bug from time to time.

As you can imagine not very conductive to a healthy development process, not to mention costing them a ton of time wasted on duplicates and replication time.

Imo this, together with recent move to remove Vivaldi from UA string are business decisions aimed at obscuring how they are doing. Internal company structures, not showing how (not)many employees they have, speed of development, company trajectory, user traction, deployment numbers, etc.
Would you be willing to talk about what you have for a backend for the PeerTube instance?
(Attempt 2)

>I said I didn't criticize their deplatforming

Saying that something is at risk of being weaponized is pretty close to criticism imo.
> Why I must opt-out from selling my data?

Opt-out is more profitable than opt-in. If adtech had to make do with opt-in, it would starve to death for lack of data because most people make do with the default option and—as you pointed out—most people don't want to be stalked or to have their data rented out to every corporation that wants to send them an unsolicited sales pitch.

Also, opt-in is the advertising equivalent of self-reporting in polling. You're not getting a representative sample of the population.
From the below article, Parler was setting up moderation policies, and organizing volunteer moderators.

And from the AWS letter, it was Parler removed some of the offending posts, but not all of them, and not quickly enough for Amazon.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/9/22221730/apple-removes-sus...

I’m still looking for the original source of Parler’s response to Apple.
Accounts created just for ideological battle aren't allowed here. Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There is a difference between cases when business needs to spend effort to assist you, and when it needs to spend effort to prevent you. Here preventing is actually harder, because there is no difference to AWS/Twitter which combination of numbers it stores and it has to go out of its way to read the number and block specifically your speech.
You might post on the IETF JSON and CBOR lists for feedback, help, and additional use-cases and considerations. They're a focal point for likeminded people, including implementors and users who have experience with common usage issues, upgradability, implementation simplicity, and other concerns related to human and machine-readable data interchange formats.

cbor@ietf.org https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/cbor/

json@ietf.org https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/json/
No one will be charged, tried or formally accused of these counts. They are nothing more than political words.
You make some good points. I want to reply to a couple of them.

I like the idea of a decentralized platform, but I agree that the solution has to be a legislative one. What's being lost is the "national conversation" on the subject and now private companies are deciding for everyone. Billions of people are now being told they don't get to decide how they interact with society; instead, literally a few people are deciding on behalf of billions. There is very little way to spin that as a positive result. This is what democracy is literally for - "we all decide together what we want the rules to be". I'm... honestly so saddened to see that people can't see that.

If "the people" decide, and what's happening now is what everyone votes for? Great! I may not like it but at least we know that we used good means since the means determine the ends. Right now, the means we are using is literally corporations acting as governments - making decisions for billions.

Re: idea has to pass the child porn test: agree. There's a few others too like illegal incitement etc. A platform needs a meaningful way to detect and remove this (not only because the law requires it, but this is a protective measure to ensure everyone gets to interact on that platform instead of it just disappearing).
We've been doing this for 20 years, it's only gotten worse. Good speech is losing and information reality has forked. We can't fix this by letting it ride.
Honestly, as someone who has grown up in the world of JS and interpreted languages, It's really important to teach them the fundamentals like filesystems, the command line, and especially harder, compiled languages, rather than JS or Python. I would recommend a good solid foundation like Java (especially if they like Minecraft).
> Eg. If you go into a coffee shop and start smashing windows and beating people up and rallying for people to murder each other the coffee shop doesn’t need “due process” to kick you out and ban you.

Then, the leader of that riot should go to jail for 25 years for murder, not simply "banned from coffee shop".

Also, in a real situation, employees would first keep themselves safe and call police to handle the matter.

In your imaginary situation, would you ask your minimum-wage employees to handle violence in the store?

This is my point exactly. Twitter should just follow the law. If Trump breaks the law, then get a court order to remove him or call the police.

Dorsey and Zuck shouldn't play police.

Also, who's screaming? Just search on twitter. Dorsey and Zuck has been called Nazis, white supremacists, racists for not banning Trump.
Free speech like the response to this week by the Cincinnati Mayor?

> "These are traitors," Cranley said, mentioning a pro-Trump supporter, Ashli Babbitt, a California resident who was shot and killed by Capitol police and a history of supporting unfounded conspiracy theories. "Traitors get shot. That's what happened." [0]

Is that the sort of inciting violence that should get you banned on Twitter?

[0]: https://www.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/news/2021/01/08/as-co...
Interestingly, open source colas do exist - with recipes under the GPL even.
Why would they do that? How would it be any different if the government shut down their hosting service vs. someone else's?

They'd still have to do their normal legal thing they do, while also having to manage a hosting service.
Theres now an incentive to make a "one click" tor browser that removes all the friction.

Hope big tech keeps showing their teeth so we can make solutions to make them irrelevant, their power is not real
You refuse to acknowledge that sedition actually occurred, choosing instead to worry over a theoretical slippery slope of censorship that somehow ends the United States.

QED. Safe to say we're done here.
According to the CEO's post, it seems Parler's engineering was smart and didn't rely on any proprietary AWS services.
Well, the bar seems pretty high at

"Your users committed an act of insurrection against the current legitimate democratic government"
Then in that case they will surely be desirous of de-platforming the toxic content on Twitter, which advocates, among other things, the destruction of Israel By Iran and the internment of Uyghurs in Sinjiang. Who would want their corporate identity sullied by such content?

As for the slippery slope, in my opinion we're headed with accelerating pace toward Kotkin's Neo-feudalism. The suppression of dissent is one important piece of the process.

https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Neo-Feudalism-Warning-Global-M...
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25692834.
Thanks for the followup, just seeing this now. I think perhaps we're not on the same page about the central hypothesis.

1. Is nationwide crime up 2019 -> 2020? We agree, yes it is, and quite a bit! This link, as well as previous ones show that. My hunch is covid and its economic fallout is likely the primary factor.

2. Is nationwide crime up in the last 10 years? We agree, they are somewhat.

3. Are local crime rates in St Louis up? Sure, but thats a bit besides the point I was originally making, which was related to nationwide crime and the lead-crime hypothesis, as local factors can add noise to analysis.

4. Do recent nationwide crime trends look anything like the massive bump in nationwide crime the lead-crime hypothesis seeks to explain, thus potentially invalidating the hypothesis? This is the question I was asking. I believe recent crime trends do not invalidate it.

As I stated before, "none of this data at a macro scale looks like the trend we see in the 70s-80s that the lead-crime hypothesis seeks to describe". Later [1] in the tweet thread you just posted, the author shows a chart of murder stats going back to 1960. It shows a massive bump in the 70s-80s (up to 10 murders per 100k) followed by a sharp drop through the 90s (down to fewer than 6 murders per 100k). This has not been replicated since, ergo, current crime trends are not sufficient to refute the hypothesis.

[1] https://twitter.com/Crimealytics/status/1343955297073770496
Well, it’s happened to me so...
Hilarious how historic government symbols and tradition are suddenly cool again, after a summer of statues, monuments, and buildings being vandalized and toppled.
Exactly because right now, between Apple, Google and AWS, several billion people have had a decision made for them.

That looks like government behavior to me.
Anything with a camel..lol
It's not even that simple... for instance some circuits are more susceptible to thermal drift, or dirty power.
> A platform should not apply one set of rules to most of its users, and then apply a more permissive set of rules to politicians and world leaders who are already immensely powerful.

Ok... why not?

A government is an unavoidably violent institution, and what's more, one which assumes the right and responsibility to use violence. In a free nation, it derives that right through various rituals from the consent of the governed, but it remains a fact: if a governmental leader says, for example, "There's a curfew, stay home or be arrested", that's what's going to happen.

If I message someone else "leave your house and me and my boys will stomp you", it's different, isn't it.

So I ask again: why should there be one set of rules for both?
Didn't stop the attack on the Capitol being organized there. In fact there is another attack being organized there for the inauguration. There are many far-right watch groups tracking this.
As much as I dislike Parler, I very much so hope that ISPs don't ban it. Imagine if ISPs get to block whatever website they deem dangerous. That cannot have a good ending.
Your account has been using the site primarily (exclusively even?) for political and ideological battle. That's the line at which we ban accounts, regardless of which politics or ideology they're battling for (see [1] for more explanation). We have to, because it destroys what HN is supposed to exist for, which is curious conversation, not smiting enemies.

I've therefore banned your account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. The rules are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Uh no, companies very much get decide how to moderate the platforms they own.

What law is it that prevents Amazon from booting Parler exactly?
Free speech is not just the freedom to say what you want to say. It is also the freedom not to be compelled to say what you don't want to say. That includes the right not to be compelled to let others use you to broadcast messages you disagree with.

Furthermore, freedom of speech does not imply freedom from consequences.
He can't afford that financially
> No, everybody is. In a democratic society, it is the responsibility of every citizen and corporation to act in accordance with democratic values.

Exactly, everybody is. In a democratic society, everybody decides together what the rules for things like this are, not 2-3 tech CEOs.

I say, draft laws around this and let the people vote on them. Then at least we'd have some basis for doing things like this.
Trolling isn't free speech?
Your whole second paragraph is incorrect, people posting that on Parley had their forum shut down. 99.99% of Parler is benign (often conservative) content, yet they are being shut out for having some of the wrong people around them.
Linguist here. I give, what's a "nominal preposition"? (I glanced at the web page and at the paper, but neither "nominal" nor "preposition" shows up in either.)
I’m not saying this is a good or bad thing, I’m not smart enough to know yet, but what you describe isn’t new.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_(person)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excommunication

Acting/speaking on specific ideas have caused people to be outcast, “social pariahs”, and excommunicated for millennia.

What is new today is the scale that people can reach, and the ability to excommunicate a person’s scale without excommunicating them.
Interesting read. My TL;DR is that from their perspective, what Trump has said does _not_ constitute incitement of violence.
How do you link (legally) hate speech (protected by constitution) -> “direct” violence -> individuals -> charges?

Haven’t seen evidence of that in any of these cases, by companies, MSM, legal parties, or honest people—- especially when looking at riots earlier in the year.
This. Malaysian ex-PM tweets that Muslims "have 'right' to kill French". Despite the outrage he's still free to tweet. Twitter cares about its image and its advertisers.
This is a nonsense argument because the ownership structure of Twitter has not changed in 7 years. People are not getting booted now because of who the executives or investors are, they are betting booted because of what they chose to say on Twitter.

I don’t trust anyone to “not betray me.” I trust that if Twitter makes unpopular moderation decisions, they will lose in the marketplace. But if they make popular decisions, they will succeed in the marketplace, even if those decisions piss some people off. This is the basis for all platform moderation, including here on HN, or even something as simple as a grocery store asking a shouting customer to leave.