skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People here seem very certain that there won't be any negative externalities from tech companies deplatforming Trump and Parler. Let me raise several concerns.

If you are a politician, are you comfortable with a few tech CEOs holding the power to destroy your campaign? Especially when the CEOs live in the same region and contribute to similar causes? Wouldn't you seek to rein in the power of companies that have the power to destroy you? Or seek to use this power against your political enemies?

"Don't attempt a coup," you say. Sure. But the stated reason by the companies is generally that Trump campaign encouraged and promoted violence - are you sure that this rational will be narrowly applied going forward? Especially when there's an effort by some to redefine hurtful language as violence?

If having active/robust moderation is a hard requirement to exist as a viable app, wouldn't this prohibit new social media companies from going viral? FB/Twitter spends millions and employs an army of contractors to moderate their platforms. Can a new startup that's growing exponentially build moderation before they're shut down by Apple/Google/AWS?

On a related note, does it concern you that the last two social media apps that seriously challenged FB/IG/Twitter are Tik Tok and Parler, and the American government forced a sale of the former and private companies collectively decided to boot the latter?

Hey, I'm just being paranoid. I'm sure these monopolistic companies will use their power perfectly going forward and never make any mistakes. I'm also sure that government will respect their reasonable use of power and leave them alone.
no, that's exactly the misguided fear that deflects concern from where it should be placed. last week was nothing. it was a small and relatively powerless group of people lashing out at an increasingly captive system. that we can no longer mostly elect non-millionaire presidents and congresspeople is the real threat.
Ahh, okay. That part didn't stand out to me in the initial description. So, like, a Common Application for ToS agreements, right? One ToS to rule them all, and one ToS to (legally) bind them.

One concern I'd have is that the level of access I'm willing to give websites isn't always universal, even within the same category. On the other hand, there's some things I really just don't care about and whatever website can help themselves. Just something to consider.
You at least get the email address of your customers (unlike say when Google deprecated payments recently with the Chrome Web Store, so it would have been much harder to retain existing customers).

How does this compare to something like Stripe? How would Stripe help you keep them if something happened to Stripe?
One of the most interesting things cable news networks do is compile clips of their competitors caught in acts of hypocrisy, self-contradiction, breathless hyperbole and blatant lying.

They can all do this to each other because they are all guilty of it. Cable news is a tower of partisan propaganda.
Indeed, no business wants to carry unnecessary liability.

Funny, Didn't see all this crying about censorship when MC & Visa cut off pornhub...

edit: just to be clear, I mean when MC & Visa decided pornhub was a potential liability, they cut them off. When companies decide Trump or Parler are a liability - they do the same - they cut them off. Thats just capitalism.
I’m the author, and definitely will. Aiming for a 2+ posts a month.

In the GitHub repo above you have links to other blogposts by yours truly
Silent Invasion is also excellent.
When I eventually got an NPS e-mail from them, I gave them a 1, and explained that I couldn't get through to actual engineers so we gave up, and then a solution engineer
followed up and apologized and informed me that if there was anything they could do, to let them know.

I never wanted to bang my head against the monitor harder than in that moment.
I actually had that in my first draft of my comment. But I hadn't read it in a while and just did.

While he endorses 0-based in one of the remarks, he's actually endorsing the notational format of:

a <= x < b or [a,b)

Where if b is renamed N, the length of a vector/array/list, in a 0-based notation, then you'd describe a 0-based vector's range as [0,N). The reasons he gives for preferring this notation for ranges (not, strictly, for 0-based ranges, but for all ranges):

1. Experience at Xerox where this notation (versus the other 3 he describes) leads to fewer errors. An informal study but a study none the less.

2. Using either [a,b) or (a,b], the size of the range is the difference between the provided bounds.

3. Using [a,b), adjacent ranges can be detected where b_1 = a_2. Given ranges [2,13) and [13,20) you can see that they're adjacent by just comparing two values. This certainly makes it quick to visually inspect as a code reader/writer. (the same argument can be made for (a,b])

4. An argument for either [a,b) or [a,b] is that the lower bound should be described by the minimum number in the range because it's more aesthetically pleasing.

So by process of elimination, he's left us with [a,b) as the better notation of the 4 options.

Based on an aesthetic argument, if you accept the above, then 0-based makes more sense because [0,N) is more aesthetically pleasing than [1,N+1). But if you use notation (c) from his report:

a <= x <= b or [a,b]

Then 1-based can be described as the interval [1,N] where N is both the last element and the length of the vector/array/list. Which seems rather pleasant/natural to my eyes and fingers as well.

----------

If we accept the experience at Xerox, then his argument for 0-based indices is reasonable based on the assumption that ranges should be described as [a,b). If we don't accept it, then his argument is mostly based on aesthetics. That is, it's more pleasant to do a computation like:

range size = b - a

than (for ranges described with [a,b]):

range size = b - a + 1

And it's more pleasant to do a comparison like:

adjacent? b_1 = a_2

than (for ranges described with [a,b]):

adjacent? b_1 = a_2 - 1

But that first case doesn't matter in a 1-based array because the range size is just `b`, it's already stated in the range and there's no need for computation (just as it's present in 0-based ranges). Now, if your language permits arbitrary ranges then I think a case could be made for his suggested [a,b) notation. But if you're only choosing between 0-based or 1-based, I don't find it persuasive. It's still a tossup for me, neither is better than the other unless you also choose his notation for describing ranges, where [1,N+1) would be awkward but [1,N] is easier to use and understand.
The last time I looked into Nix (a few years back) the expression language was very under documented which made it very difficult to use (e.g. searching for lots of examples to copy paste, instead of working from first principles). Has this gotten better?
Since Twitter is blocked in China, what does Twitter have to gain by letting CCP officials post?
I don't disagree with anything you've just said. I think I'm just focusing on the present and future, while you are talking about how we got here.

I find it much easier these days to get people to consider trying a non-Windows environment but it never goes well because of these small issues.

Of course people expect things to behave in certain ways because Microsoft had an anti-competitive monopoly and most people learned about computing using their platform.

It's an unfair, shitty situation.

But the point remains that desktop GNU/Linux has a lot of these little UX bugs, and we're not even paying attention to them. The experience isn't as smooth as Windows because we don't have dedicated UI/UX designers thinking over these issues and trying to come up with cohesive solutions.

When's the last time a new consumer-facing UX paradigm that 'just worked' came out of the open-source world? Apple churns them out, oftentimes created from scratch, and it extends to their physical hardware design (ie the ipod scroll wheel was amazing for its time, airpods are a joy to use).

The open source world makes amazing things but the UX quality _is_ a major issue in the uptake of new users today.
Because the issue isn't purely against content moderation, it's that content moderation is not applied equally and even less so when those who should be moderated shared the same "values" as the left-leaning SV types.
All this discussion and Stan Kelly-Bootle's quote hasn't come up yet? Shameful.

(For the uninitiated:

> Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration. -- Stan Kelly-Bootle

)
Why do you call it a conspiracy?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25720423
I've read similar accounts, including people who are themselves on oxygen, dying of covid, insisting that it's just a hoax.
Fools cars and cows alike
You are not facebooks target audience.
Which is hilarious, because it's like a Trojan propaganda piece. Pretend like it's a secret playbook, "oops, you weren't supposed to see our totally secret plan for world domination!!!"
> Convincing people who don't understand very well their rights, democracy, civics, and etc that their RIGHTS were being infringed; by others exercising their rights.

I dont think we need to infantilize Trump supporters. They are capable of evaluating claims made by the GOP.
While I agree - I reckon it's far past time that we pierce the outdated "corporate personhood" idea, and let Tesla/Uber/Apple/Waymo et al. know that society has chosen to hold their "corporate personhood" responsible in the same way people are held responsible.

If your corporation (via it's self driving software) kills someone, the corporation will "go to jail", a C level exec does the jailtime and the entire company will be unable to carry on any of it's normal business for the duration of the sentence (while still being held responsible for it's obligations to staff/suppliers/cerditors). If that self driving software is judged to be liable for a traffic infringement, the corporation will pay an amount equal to the percentage of income that a human driver would have paid. If it's an infringement with a ~$400 fine, the corporation should pay ~0.5% of their annual income - the same sort of penalty as "an average salary" person.

A couple of $20mil fines and a 6 month total company shutdown would be very "proactive" in encouraging Tesla to get Elon to shut the fuck up with his big bold claims that cannot be backed up. If Uber had been slapped with the "corporate personhood" equivalent of whatever penalty a human driver who'd killed that person crossing the road with a bicycle they'd be far more circumspect about using minimum wage contractors as "safety drivers" in their prototypes.

(I can dream, right?)
> On Italy [name of a map], the flag of Italy is removed

How is the flag of Italy offensive to the Chinese Communist Party?
Yes, but... that doesn't justify entering the capital or climbing the building either. The state of security isn't the topic of discussion above.
What else do you call people supporting fascists?
We Worked Together on the Internet. Last Week, He Stormed the Capitol
Most people outside the tech bubble can't tell an ad from a search result.
They don't use ad blockers either, that's why banners saying "DOWNLOAD NOW" in flashing red letters work so well, leading them to download something completely different from that antivirus or PDF reader software they originally searched for.
Ask any electronics place, hackaday, reddit or else. I bet solid money they'll diagnose the sh*t out of your mac. As long as there's no massive charred spot / big burned area it may be a matter of replacing the few overheated components. It's a super well known piece of equipment, always a plus.
plenty of transmen that many of us are trying to empower too.........

the non-sexist trans inclusivity movement overlapped with the female inclusivity movement

trans exclusionary feminism is considered radical, its what the R in Terf stands for. It means it doesn't have consensus.

yes, some positions and status will go to males that are transwoman instead of females. I don't think there is any coordination or plot in this to "erase females".

(I feel like this concept is different across English speaking countries, in America the movement has landed on the concept that we have separated sex and gender, so there are two sexes which remains binary: male and female, and there are non-binary genders which includes but it not limited to man and woman designations, and they don't have to match the sex. Sometimes I see people in the UK getting into semantics issues with an American audience, whether they are purposefully being insensitive or not.)
Lightweight, offline-first log store inspired by Secure Scuttlebutt
I agree on those points. Especially on the first: when people put in the hard work, those pay dividends — but often mean those apps lag behind when Apple does breaking changes (which must happen at least every 3 or 4 years).

Apple’s Pro-apps are very alien. I expect that’s because they appeal to an audience that spends almost all their time in them, not moving much between a whole bunch of apps.

Lastly: Nothing’s ever as non-native as a GTK app. :D Qt and Wx apps do an infinitely better job than any GTK app I’ve seen for macOS, even if I don’t think they come very close aside from tapping into Cocoa’s control drawing.
iOS Setup Guide for Digital Minimalists – MJUK
How would you go about that? Chinese money is everywhere, including US government debt. Send that supplement check back?
The New China Challenge Stems from Beijing’s Old Ambitions
The underlying problem with this whole idea of banning "seditious lies/libel" is that it's not strategically consistent. If you ban people (especially political leaders!) from complaining that the election was stolen, what happens is that the next election will definitely be stolen, and no one will be able to do anything about it. Then that whole political side throws their support behind some military figure instead of a reality TV star, and that's how the real coup happens and how democracy dies. Game Over.

This stuff has been thought over very thoroughly, a long time ago. It's not nearly as trivial as y'all seem to think it is.
But it's true. Original versions of WhatsApp had no encryption at all, even in transit. https://web.archive.org/web/20110523235136/http://www.yourda...
I wonder whether this work could eventually enable a native Vulkan port for MacOS on this GPU.
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play.

"They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."

-- Jean-Paul Sartre
This. I get periodically frustrated with Gnome and give KDE a go and always end up going back to Gnome within a couple of weeks. I want to like it, I want it to work but Gnome (on my setup) is more responsive and that is more important than all of the other deficiencies of Gnome.
These lines of thinking actually work, though. Which is very interesting in itself.
Love me some LGR. Love me my retro computing too (8-bit Atari guy here).
By definition, a company is allowed to make a decision iff it is lawful.
> ...I tend to get the opposite impression.

I think it can go either way, depending on who you read, because contemporary variation has always been greater than difference over time. Much of what I read in Galen or Aristotle sounds like it could have come from a colleague, while a lot of posts on HN strike me as coming from an alternate reality.
Good to know that there are some things out there, though. A few glasses of ice water in Hell, so to speak.
My wife and I were out driving looking at Christmas lights a few weeks ago and I tried to reverse the car with no other cars around but the car did an emergency stop because the lights confused the system into thinking someone was behind me or going to cross behind me. Automatic can be good but also too easily fooled.
The gnome file picker is so bad that I will pretty much always load files by drag and droping files into the application from a file browser!
> The idea that Biden will take a hard line on China is equally ridiculous.

As I've said elsewhere, politicians can be remarkably flexible. Ignoring that there is no realpolitik for him to have been hard on china while the country was liberalizing, close to 90% of Republicans and a supermajority of democrats thinks China is a strategic enemy of the US - you gain nothing from being soft on china in today's political climate.
The vaccine is being distributed. Why do we need more video conferencing apps?
I think Calibre can convert from pdf to kindle format
What is going to stop someone from putting up a sign on the side of a highway that looks like a photo of a red light? Very cheap to deploy and extremely dangerous.

I remember seeing a post on HN (but I can’t find it) where simply flashing such a photo for ~100ms was enough to get cars to come to a sudden stop
gccrs is written in C++, so no worries there.
Well, yes, you're right, I was asleep/away when that apparent meltdown happened.

I'm still kinda amazed that there hasn't been a front page discussion regarding AWS/Parler. I've tried really hard to understand your points, but I can't really follow your logic.

> You can argue that AWS is in a different category than app stores and that therefore this article was indeed SNI. I actually agree with that. But as I said, the thread wasn't any different

There were two top-level comments (and three commments in total). That seems like it may be a bit of premature to judge from?

Is the solution to make a new post in a day or two, with some nuance?
This reminded me of something Knuth says about this paper (starting around 8:17) in the talk I mentioned in another comment, showing that his historical knowledge, at least on this particular topic, wasn't always so deep:

> The other background to this work… In 1962 I was asked to give a talk at the ACM National Conference which was held in Syracuse, and this [slide] was the review that occurred in Datamation. And basically he pans the thing [the conference]. He says “Fortunately a large number of the society's members were unable to attend.” And he goes on and says “Well, the hotel was pretty good and there was good breakfast…” But he says here “Another paper which was titled A History of Writing Compilers”—which was mine—“was actually the history of one individual's rather limited experience with *a* compiler”.

> Well, that wasn't exactly true, but it was true enough: in other words, in 1962 I didn't know about almost anything of what I'm going to tell you tonight. So I took it as “maybe, you know, if I'm going to talk about the history of something, maybe I ought to actually research it, look into it.” And so over the next few years I started learning more about this and the more I learned the more fascinating it got…

More broadly though, I echo your comment about Knuth's passion for history, which goes surprisingly deep: in fact in his paper “Ancient Babylonian Algorithms” (click on any of the PDF links at https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=10887370978433539...) he mentions having used dictionaries of Akkadian and Sumerian to make sure his translation was accurate, and in a 2016 lecture (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UFkH5ZlVqQ or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjZB9HvddQk = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK4jnuCWl0Y) he mentions learning enough Sanskrit (or at least the Devanagari script) to fix an error in the transliteration in a Wikipedia article.
> Once Apple noticed a new innovative product that was gaining traction (the Bragi Dash on kickstarter, and possibly before this) they created a best in class product the Apple Air Pods.

Apple Airpods debuted in 2016. The Bragi Dash Kickstarter dates from 2017. Besides which, Apple products are years in the making.

The OP provides no evidence that such an heuristic is used at Apple, and I’ve never seen this “framework” referenced anywhere besides this post.

The framework may have value in of itself, but the connection to Apple is tenuous and unsubstantiated.
Thanks. Also: elsewise --> otherwise. Oops.
The firms are responding to the same events and pressures in similar ways. It doesn't require coordination or conspiracy to explain that.

You're right that there's likely opportunity for some disruptive differentiation. That often comes from the outside rather than established companies, and also we tend to hear about the few successful disrupters and not the many, many more failures.
https://orat.io/blog/as-of-today-whatsapp-is-blocking-telegr...

Whatsapp blocking Telegram links
Fwiw the Wikipedia page for this book includes an external link to the full text at Citeseer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrestricted_Warfare#External_...
I get it - to you it's just a political flame war. Easier to just brand everyone who voted for Trump a terrorist sympathizer, than to consider the myriad reasons they may have had for voting how they did. It's only 74.2 million people after all.

Maybe easier for you to dismiss concerns your fellow technologists might have, when Big Tech's largest companies unite to completely destroy a competitor with millions of users in a single day, based on the actions of a tiny sliver of its users.

"What's the difference?" you ask, I assume non-ironically.

I wonder, let's say if a politician started a fund to bail out the arrested protesters, would you consider them complicit in the violence?
> that it's purely a conspiracy theory

Who's saying that? The Biden-China things which seem to be being explored is a conspiracy theory, as in an unsubstantiated theory about an alleged conspiracy, but I don't think anyone is under the impression that the Chinese getting up to stuff is a conspiracy theory.
What's the CCP's greatest investment? US treasuries.

To the tune of trillions of dollars, the CCP is funding the tyrannical American military that invaded Iraq, and killed hundreds of thousand of innocent civilians.

Those curious about this could read more about this here, which documented Obama's unrestricted drone warfare[1]:

[1]https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/unblinking-sta...

HN readers should take care to not associate themselves or their companies with these moral outrages.

Congress should pass a law banning all Chinese investments in US treasuries. Or perhaps Trump could do another Executive Order before his impeachment.
Unfortunately personal accountability vs accountability by group affiliation is a divisive subject between Left/Right.

No one, no matter their intentions, will ever be able to actually discuss any of these issues because we can't even agree on fundamentals like language and "permitted" words.
There are, as others pointed out, but they are a lot more expensive. I used an angle grinder with a sanding disc on my cheap Lodge to get a similar effect.
The linux desktop has mostly arrived-- it's just we all switched from desktops to laptops a while ago.
China says that for diplomatic reasons violent conflict in real countries is not to be displayed. I don't know if there is an ulterior motive.
It literally had hate in the name.