skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reddit:

For non-pedantic, non-esoteric, non-stickler, relevant, non-US-specific practical solutions/answers/discussions from normal people (usually in that specific geographic or topic subreddit).

MeFi:

It's a cosy little place. Even though it's also mostly centred around the USA (it's natural as that's the demographic it seems), it's not bad. Wanted conversations where others were not trolling, or giving knee-jerk reactions, and responses full of sense of self-entitlement and ones that basically just said "you are doing it wrong!". I also wanted to have a place where you are visibly anonymous but not really anonymous when you try to get away with something nasty.

SA:

It was a mistake.
Relevant to this: Amazon has told Parler it's pulling the plug on its hosting midnight pacific time Monday[0].

I think big tech regulation might become the new bipartisan topic de jour as a result of this. Ironically, given past positions of the Supreme Court[1], I really don't see private companies being forced to host whatever content people what them to being a thing at any point in the near future, so it seems as though they'd probably be against anything conservatives have been demanding for as of recent.

This might be the rye talking at this point, but one of the preceding events to the civil war was violence in the house of congress[2]. Don't need to tell anyone about Wednesday's violence, but that did cause us to miss the almost-fist-fight on Tuesday[3]. I don't think we're headed towards civil war yet, but I think how the people that instigated the recent events are handled, by the public and criminally, will dictate that.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/09/amazon-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...

[2] https://www.history.com/news/charles-sumner-caning-cilley-du...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/01/07/congress-fi...
Ask HN: Does HN Tacitly Enable Racism?
Free speech is one thing but silence is another. HN doesn’t seem to want to even condemn a lot of the quietly racist views expressed here. Not ban - simply condemn.

I’m not a person of color and I don’t find the discourse on the site to be “kind.” I would imagine a person of color would probably feel pretty enraged reading some of the quietly yet obviously racist views expressed.

I’m aware this probably violates site guidelines and am OK being banned. I think the community is valuable enough that it deserves an opportunity to reflect on what it stands for.
> it kind of sucks to have to do a big refactor across your codebase to replace borrowed fields with owned fields

Some refactorings in Rust has brought back memories of refactoring struggles with highly coupled code bases, where one seemingly small change ends up requiring touching many many areas of the code.

The omniscient need to define ownership across a code base seems to make it easy to introduce high coupling, which is unavoidable unless you start using shared_ptr/RC all over the place.
Amazon Web Services gives Parler 24-hour notice that it will suspend services
Could you explain what this has to do with my point please, as I haven't defended Parler nor have I criticized the deplatforming?
They have been for years. Ever heard of diversity hiring. Diversity = anti-white = leftist. Overwelming majority of whites and white males vote republican and support trump. That is what diversity hiring has been all about.
Except that's not at all what I said. I actually chose that example because I think the vast majority of people wouldn't approve it.

They're arguing that this action is fine because they own the platform, so they can kick off whoever they want to. Do they accept that this also includes justifying kicking off people generally thought of as good?
The Economics of Censorship Resistance (2004) [pdf]
A couple things stick out from the legislative and violent coup attempt at the Capitol. The legislative side looked doomed to fail so Trump rallied his peers and incited them with words like trial by combat via Rudy Giuliani.

1. Pence was pressured before and DURING the siege. Trump called once his followers were besieging the building to pressure Pence to overthrow the certified votes of this nation. His rhetoric was 100% responsible for the crowd's focus on Pence.

2. Trump directly pointed at the media at the rally and labeled them again as the enemy. During the siege all sorts of media members were violently assaulted. With the mob labeling them antifa as a means to rationalize mob violence against them. An AP reporter sustained a beating for several minutes as the crowd shouted for his death.

The doors on the Capitol building had "murder the media" scrawled on it by Trump/GOP's supporters. They chanted for Pence's hanging at the same doors.

This was a coup attempt coordinated and driven by sitting Republicans and the President of the USA. There is a direct line to be drawn from their actions to the results seen in the Capitol. The coup barely failed.
This kind of behavior can kill the legal system pretty easily. Responding takes much more time and effort than committing the offenses in the first place, the sanctions have little effect, and the lawyer continues to practice. Probably he'll just ignore the order to send copies of the judgement to his clients.

The problem is the same with conspiracy theories -- they take way more time and effort to refute than to spin, and the proponents just ignore the refutations.

Of course these aren't distinct -- the conspiracy theories are easily converted into absurd court cases. However in the recent incidents the lawyers seem to have tried to avoid sanctions. Trump should probably have hired sovereign citizens who aren't limited by those considerations.

I think this is a structural problem with our social systems -- they depend on people at least minimally following the rules. If some groups just ignore the rules egregiously enough the system can't effectively counter. Kind of a distributed denial of service attack.

Maybe giving judges the ability to lock up or disbar people like this would work for legal problems. Unfortunately we have no equivalent likely fix for those who spin conspiracy theories -- deleting twitter and facebook accounts doesn't seem very effective.
Orrrr the right wing could learn to not be complete assholes to the point where all their providers refuse to serve them
Even revolutionary variants don’t necessarily need violence. It’s certainly a high potential in revolution, but not a guarantee. This isn’t just hypothetical, all or nearly all of us on here have witnessed revolutions which didn’t employ violence (though they certainly endured it).
> What is legal speech or not should be decided by courts

How would that work in practice? Say I run a forum and I want to take down a post that's calling for a mosque to be blown up. Should I need to hire a detective to discover the identity behind the account, file a lawsuit, serve that person some papers, and wait for the case to make its way through the courts? Do I need to leave the post up while that's taking place?
A great example that's relevant today is that people in the West over 60 yo remember society pre-Social Marxism.

There's a lot of their Youtube videos on how successful families are constructed for the benefit of individuals and society, which is a "lost art" today.

Suzanne Venker (Traditional Family Counselling)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt29HUEqVF2pB5yb_KZRebg
> In an email obtained by BuzzFeed News, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Trust and Safety team told Parler Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoff that the calls for violence propagating across Parler violated its terms of service and that Amazon is unconvinced that the service’s plan to use volunteers to moderate such things will be effective.

The article seems to suggest that it's calls for violence that have violated its ToS (presumably agreed upon at time of hosting or earlier).

> it seems pretty obvious that this did not happen because of the simple facts in evidence regarding Parler, but because of the broader context that a lot of people were beginning to try to pressure Amazon to drop Parler.

So I don't see how what you say is indeed obvious, since Amazon's relationship to Parler suffice to explain the termination, absent any public sentiment or pressure.

Perhaps your argument would be bolstered if you can provide an example of a service with similar volume of calls to violence that has not yet been booted off.
The pirate bay manages to stay online
Oh boo hoo a company is being thrown in the trash because they encourage terrorism against elected officials.
My favourite thing was getting sitebanned from Reddit for advocating the use of face masks, especially for high risk populations (ie the elderly or those with pre-existing conditions).

Apparently I was spreading misinformation because WHO said masks don’t help the general public.
Self-reply: I realize some of that came off as political, but that wasn't my intention.

I am interested in what military tactics and strategy a hypothetical non-traditional war with China might look like. Especially if China decided to strike-first with an art-of-war, covert and/or subversive type attack on society/ culture (and not military).

I guess my overall point is:

I'm more concerned with lack of parity in the non-traditional and non-military cultural warfare possibilities that a conflict with China might present.

Not so-much with overall military capabilities, even as military-tech approaches parity.

And that the US will once again find itself "fighting it's previous war."
Everyone saying they deserve it for "facilitating attacks on the US government", ask yourself if you believe Antifa should be kicked off of every platform they exist on for burning police stations.

This is hypocrisy. Far too much of modern tech is held by companies happy to use it as a political weapon, and all for one side. I'm disgusted by the people who populate Parler, but I'm actually afraid of these tech authoritarians.
As someone who is frustrated by this, and who years ago also joined now-deleted FB groups where ISIS advocates shared propaganda, yes I am equally frustrated. I believe the value of preserving and maintaining open discussions on the internet outweighs the silencing of them for political aims. In the case of Parler, they do actually moderate some content, and I believe it is conceivable they would adopt a policy to ban violence, but it's too little to late now.
There are quite a number of people on Parler promoting and quasi-coordinating literal assassinations.

This is a pretty good lesson on the parameters of 'free speech'.

If there is no moderation on a platform, people will use it to organize straight up murder.

So there 'must be a line' somewhere, and then it gets complicated from there.

(Edit: I don't mean necessarily a legal line on expression, rather, companies 'have to moderate' forums somehow.)

Also - a wrench in the logic - Twitter is still used by some 'very bad hombres' - Ayatollah Khomeini is still on Twitter and uses it to say some things considerably more outrageous and ostensibly violent than Trump ever has. So I feel that there's some hypocrisy here, Twitter could probably let go of him as well if they for their own reasoning believe that Trump has incited violence. I feel that we often use different standards for internal politics than we do for geopolitics (we often look the other way when people do stuff elsewhere) Twitter might want to reconsider.
The government designating terrorist groups is a bad yardstick, because US law enforcement can only designate foreign terrorist organizations.
I also think there's an incredible amount of cognitive dissonance from people who staunchly defend Section 230, then turn around and cite comments submitted by users as an excuse to shut down the entire platform. There's no way in hell they're able to keep up with the moderation requirements given how fast the platform must be growing right now.

I don't even like Parler, but I think this is a dangerous, dangerous precedent that will only turn up the temperature.
Is there actually mass deplatforming of regular conservative groups? Where is this happening?
There is no ask. That they are even getting a migration period is very gracious of Amazon. When the decision to ban was made, Parler ceased being a customer and became a liability - one that AWS would presumably try to get rid of as fast as possible. They have no responsibility to keep their services open for Parler.
Well, in three years the president has gone from claiming that there were more people at his inauguration than there actually were, to undermining democracy by persisting for months in his claims of election fraud despite failing to produce any evidence for it in the courts (while ignoring a pandemic that is currently killing 3000 people a day in his country). How about that for a slippery slope?
I'm not exactly disagreeing that maybe parler should be taken to task, but amazon should not be the ones to do it. although, the historical application of the insurrection act has been incredibly political and inconsistent (the pullman strikes), so citing it as the primary reason for booting parler seems a little suspect to me.
Yeah, this is quite remarkable. basically they are agreeing with the Government's case against Snowden. If most people would go to Jail for what Snowden did then so should Snowden!

Yay EFF! Thanks for the cooked spaghetti backbone buddy.
Yes, if you get too many people mad at you, you're going to have a bad time no matter how just your cause. In some cases we've decided as a society to protect people who might get a lot of anger directed at them through no fault of their own, like because of their race or sexuality. I doubt we're going to extend those protections to include people who incite violence, but maybe we can extend them in other ways as appropriate to make sure people aren't undeservedly deplatformed.
Where do they go next? DigitalOcean? Linode?
You're using the deadly medical emergencies of three participants to bolster the idea that they were behaving violently and you want to accuse me of arguing in bad faith?
The cynical read for “why wait until the last week” is to make China/US relations even more difficult for Biden. The Trump admin doesn’t have to deal with fallout.
By that logic, Twitter and Facebook should also be banned from using Amazon services.

Facebook’s lack of content moderation in Myanmar enabled a genocide of the Rohingya people.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46105934

In about 30 seconds of searching twitter, I found calls to “kill Trump”, try it yourself.

https://ibb.co/vvtBkvc
https://ibb.co/MSDRRNT
https://ibb.co/cbHrQpf

Deplatforming Parler is clearly politically motivated, likely for BigTech to suck up to the Dems with Dems seizing House, Senate, President.
By this logic why was @blcklivesmatter not kicked off Twitter etc long ago?
And arguably the worst secretary of state.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/mike...
Yes. PWA != app.
Do you understand the difference between free speech and conspiracy? Between opinions and inciting?

If not these are all just words you found that when strung together elicit an emotional response from yourself, and from others. A strong reaction doesn’t mean something is true, or makes sense. It just means your monkey brain reacted to it. Wisdom is separating the two.
Their response to Parler's shutdown situation will determine my respect to EFF
> Taiwanese people deserve the right to self-determination, and our support if they decide to go their own way

Would you say the same thing for the Hawaiians?

A lot of them want independence from the colonial United States. They want their nation and its territory back.

So, using your logic, would you grant them their wish?

I think not.
This isn't reddit's fault
ISPs sit behind section 230. They can’t take a political stance for shit on the wire.

The next move for Parler would be to build their own data center and buy service from ISPs.
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1347898774891491332 Glenn Greenwald says they are leaving in droves (or are being kicked out, not sure on that).
People who are easily swayed to hate and dismiss everyone with a different opinion.
But they don’t have China.
Why not? They set themselves up as a free speech alternative to Twitter and begged people to move off that platform en masse. They already have the experience of Gab to consider. They knew what they were getting into, and this was exactly the sort of even they were hoping for (Trump being kicked off Twitter, huge numbers of people relocating to their platform).
The downvotes say it all, it's a tragedy
We're not kids to be arguing over silly examples like this.
That wouldn't be new. There have always been media that target specific audiences.
It's nice that you think this is impossible. I think with the prevalence of right-wing nationalists and white supremacists especially in the Air Force a strike order against "antifa hq" or whatever would find at least one all-fascist path down from the President to a weapon, and one is all they need.

By the way, you seem to have misunderstood the intended lesson of the apple and the barrel. The point of the proverb is that it takes only one apple to ruin the whole barrel, not that just one bad apple is not a problem.
Five people are dead and the heart of our democracy was invaded by a violent mob. There are no hysterics here.
What is a situation that's both bland and incredible supposed to look like?
Its going to be pretty rare to find a modern conservative who really cares about LGBTQ to the point where they are set out to fire them based on that. (though Im sure you could find someone). I know quite a few conservatives and none of them care.

I honestly see the differences between the moderate left and moderate right as almost insignificant. If a 3rd party was formed I wouldnt even be surprised.

Were running out of room to reply here. Ill just say I guess the republican side is fractured just like the left is. For instance I know a lot of liberals who are not Marxists. Id really like that 3rd party. I feel like sane people are ready to ditch the insane people.
Do people forget that for many years since the founding of YouTube, YouTube didn't have any video ads?

The better question is, was not having ads on the YouTube platform a deliberate choice to help grow adoption over its competitors which would have had to have ads to run (at the time) the expensive servers?
Yes, it’s absurd to argue that kicking some people
off a social media website is equivalent to: an existing domestic terror group that has committed organized violence at home and abroad (Al Qaida) is going to produce an even more radical offshoot organization (ISIS) after the government is destroyed by a foreign adversary (USA) leaving an entire geographic region without any projection of force (the Levant).
Parler pulled down Lin Wood's posts floating the idea of executing Mike Pence. I guess even Parler has limits on what kind of crazy they want to be associated with.
It depends on the collective judgment of the attorneys working at the Department of Justice, and the judges hearing the case. Unfortunately, the DoJ is currently under the command of a person who has a vested interest in protecting "his" people, so attention to this issue has been lacking.
I don't have this problem normally, because I'm using Debian testing, not Debian stable. There is a major difference.

Also, the difference between imagemagick 6 and 7 isn't simply about being an older version.
What does the percentage of fatalities per interaction have to do with justice?

For the same given percentage, they could all be people who were genuine threats, or all people reaching for their wallets in their own garage.

The metric is not measuring what matters.
You are right, one should conjure up a disaster scenario. So, here’s a question - if you had 100$, what number between 1-100 would you put as investment into Bitcoin? You can’t use any number outside the range provided.
IANAL, but ...

Section 230 says that ISPs are not treated as the publisher or speaker of what their users publish or say. That does not mean that prosecutors cannot try to find companies criminally responsible for allowing users to post illegal content on their platforms, especially if they have knowledge of such content. See Backpage. And even if the companies win, the battle itself is quite damaging.

Furthermore, Section 230 says nothing about how the court of public opinion will treat the provider. These companies are thinking about more than just the legal repercussions. If their business suffers because people do not want to do work with companies that support this kind of content, then all the Section 230 protections in the world will not bring in revenue.
strong agree. I don't exactly want to been seen as defending parler here. I think what amazon is doing is creating a dangerous precedent, regardless of whether parler is as odious as I've been led to believe it is.
Violence has no place in any society for any cause. But I think the spirit of BLM slogan is "No justice no peace. We're not going to remain quiet. We're going to cause some trouble. We're going to create some noise." or as John Lewis said "Good trouble". BLM should change it to "Good trouble", it removes any misconceptions.
I really don’t understand this mentality. Why wouldn’t you want this publicly available? You really want domestic terrorists functioning underground? Not only does this prevent people from seeing and judging and debating such an idea, but it also creates a precedent for a stronger surveillance state.
These Silicon Valley-based corporations are no doubt highly ineffective at moderating content outside of a specific American, Anglophone context. Certainly the Rohingya know the fruits of their failure:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16574370

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15296442
74 million Americans voted for Trump. Nearly half the entire American voting population.

Do you really think it's a viable strategy to try to de-legitimize them all?
"A good number of the people that voted for Trump voted for him because they didn’t believe the warnings from the other side about just how unhinged Trump is."

Delusional and brainwashed thinking is what you are displaying

https://www.statista.com/chart/23886/capitol-riot-approval/

Half of republicans support the riot
Amazon has dropped Parler from AWS
Yep. At the the of the day, the internet is a network and a network requires two parties.

Turns out the net's administrators interpret some signal as damage and also route around it.
I have heard some of that, if you consume more calories then you will gain weight. If you don't then you won't.

Maybe the taste of artificial sweeteners encourages people to eat more, but as long as you don't then the diet soda is fine.
> Nobody actually needs a cake. But a head of state needs to talk to his citizens and his citizens need to hear him, even if we think he is a [insert epithet, here].

And all that head of state needs to do is hold a press conference to be heard. He or she does not need Twitter, or Facebook, or Parler, or any other social media platform.
And yet, it’s where the people who value that proposition keep flocking. It’s almost like they understand some subtext about the service and its intent.
They don’t use any of AWS’s services other than EC2 and bare metal, because they don’t want to be locked in.