skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They didn't like Twitter, so they built their own. That wasn't good enough.

You're right, they need their own metal / backend / hardware.

Of course... that would be a problem when Visa / Chase / Paypal / Stipe / Square all refuse to run their payments.

So maybe while they're building their own metal, they should build their own banking system too.
This is almost certainly false. For example, see the arrest of the leader of the Proud Boys (for events prior to Capitol, but played active role on Parler encouraging proud boys violence that day):

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/several-well-know...
I think stats is the culprit. Or lack of it. If there's one area of study that ties together observations and models, it's stats. But stats suffers from the same problem that programming does: people think it's a tool that they just need to know a little bit of, so they don't defer to the proper authorities in the area.

Of course this is just anecdotes, but I do have a friend who did stats as a phd and this is the attitude that seems to be common: stats (and code) are minor tools that won't affect the outcome of our experiment.
I might also add that a social network like Goodreads or Stack Overflow that is based around some purpose or topic, is so different in tone from general purpose social networks that lots of people don't even notice that it has essentially the same set of features. Also, way less toxic and icky feeling when you use it.

Of course, special-purpose social networks never become nearly as big as Facebook, but in my mind that's a feature, not a bug.
Anticompetitive? Is parler competing with amazon in any ways, shape or form?
Greenwald's own news organization kicked him out because he refused to let anyone fact check his grossly inaccurate posts.
What's wrong with targeting ads based on subject matter?

TV channels and magazines know how this works. If the page is about fashion, sell ad space to clothing companies. If the page is about travel, sell it to hospitality companies and tourism boards. If the page is about politics or finance, sell it to people making catheters and stair lifts.

It's much less creepy than trying to spy on everybody who reads the page, and then looking for an ad that fits your warped understanding of their preferences.
> So if we want to preserve the liberties we have today we need to think about how those would be protected in the future, and that means being careful about what precedent we set today.

The doom may be inevitable. who knows? I don't mean to be a defeatist. But I would say if a single private entity (or alliance) did control all digital communication, any actions they took could be invisible to anyone that opposed them, assuming they had sufficiently advanced machine learning capable of preventing subversive communication. You would need alternative options for communication, digital or otherwise to have any hope of overcoming such a hypothetical scenario.

My hope would be that we continue to have utilities such as phone lines, that internet would ultimately end up treated as a utility in the same sense as phone lines (especially if it completely replaces them, which is largely is doing), radio (just as ham radio operators believe in the importance of maintaining their systems), etc.

And my other hope would be that we continue to legislate and enforce against monopolies, not just on capitalistic entities but especially on privately run communication channels.
Because your vote is just as anonymous as your upvote history, which is quite a bit more private than your comment history.
Also referencing the L. Lin Wood parler https://twitter.com/parlertakes/status/1347050705110986753?s...
Maybe. And yet, North Korea and Iran both have Internet access and I can access a site like http://naenara.com.kp/ from the USA.

I suppose there are also TOR hidden services and the like, although that's difficult to scale and maintain full anonymity.
"still" as in, not film/video/moving. That it's in this case moving videos named after "digital still camera" is kind of amusing.
That's fair, there is a middle ground between C and C++. My point is that you can't expect the compiler to do everything for you in terms of creating a stable ABI for shared libraries. I think a lot of people are under the impression that this is purely a compiler feature.

What I expect to happen is that rather than "Rust gets a stable ABI" it will be "Rust very gradually builds upon the C ABI for selected features".

Most C++ libraries have templates in their signatures these days for efficiency, and Rust has a similar flavor (monomorphization). I think there is a fundamental tradeoff there between stability and performance, and both languages have a heavy emphasis on the latter. I could be missing something as I certainly don't know all the details of the C++ ABI.
But is _just reading_ from a database a "side-effect"? It is non-deterministic, but it has no side-effects. So IO jumbles together the two notions.
> Parlor was created in response to hate moderation on other platforms.

Actually most people there seem to perceive it as an alternative to the biased nature of Twitter. They didn't want to get banned on Twitter for something that's being tolerated when done by left-leaning groups.
Who is David J. Groesbeck, P.S. didnt Parler’s CEO say they lost their lawyers? It seems this would have been filed a day or two before they lost their lawyers.
All I know is, if my business was locked in to AWS (or any other single provider) I would take this as a warning to diversify my infrastructure.
That was unexpected. Certainly no love lost between those two. Very impressive stand on the part of Merkel, shows some real backbone.
The suit states that Amazon and Parler had a contract which stated that 30 day notice would be given before service termination, and if that's true then this does seem like a strong suit.

But the entire text seems really biased and borderline crazy (all that stuff about monopoly/antitrust - since when is AWS even close to a monopoly?) so I wouldn't be surprised if they elided that the contract also allowed for early terminaiton if certain terms were being violated.
Which is particularly interesting, since users were apparently shadow-banned until the mods decided their posts were acceptable. Source: https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1347939939120533506
You have an interesting specific question, about actions against a particular service (Parler).

But I think your poll results may be muddied a bit, because of the the side musings about TBL's data decentralization efforts, international telecommunications regulation, and something about "social media licenses" (?!).

Also, the provided answers are vaguely like a familiar 5-level "Likert Scale" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likert_scale), but without the standard wording (& logical/symmetrical ordering) of "strongly agree / agree / neutral / disagree / strongly disagree". (EDIT: it appears HN is randomizing the order on each reload? That's sometimes but not always a good idea.)

The most informative polls will have the least complication in wording/answers, & minimal "preamble" that risks priming answerers to think of things in the author's way.
What reason is there to think the incoming Biden/Harris regime will look to break up these big tech companies?
Twitter and Facebook have extensive systems for keeping the various horrors in check. They are not as good as I think they should be. But they're miles better than what Parler had, which was more of a fig leaf. (Full disclosure, I use to run an anti-abuse engineering team at Twitter. Now I'm at the ADL building the Online Hate Index.)

I will note that whatever antitrust beefs people have with Big Tech, Twitter isn't really in that league. Twitter's market cap is something like 4% of Google's and 6% of Facebook's. I think conflating the two issues here is unhelpful.
Why is it important if they know it’s illigal or not? Seems to me the important question is what harm they are doing to others.
No, what we have been shown in the US is that it takes a billionaire to challenge the two existing political parties. Parties who through laws and regulation pretty much isolated themselves from other means of being challenged and even go so far as to have us pay for their conventions and even security at times.

The difference in the US is the billionaire was able to challenge the existing parties in control and beat them both, in China your wealth is pretty much meaningless unless you came upon it through your party affiliation; there of course is only one party that matters.
The claim that not a single person had a Parler account is trivially refutable.

https://twitter.com/azforeman/status/1348648808390008832/pho...

If he didn't bother to look at a famous person like the "QAnon Shaman", why does the rest of this claim stand to scrutiny?
> antitrust battles against Big Tech will dominate the next four years of economic policy

Almost zero chance this happens, imo. Big tech spent _heavily_ on Democrats (98% of contributions [0]) and the Democrats have complete control for the next 4 years.

an awfully prescient allocation of funds.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/02/tech-billionaire-2020-electi...
I would say unless you're building a directly competing product then don't worry about it. Most companies aren't going to spend the time/effort to go after an employee who built a side project and then left for it. This all assumes you're not shirking your day jobs responsibilities for a side hustle...
No 'obscene usernames' is actually hilarious to me. The bastion of free speech won't even allow users to choose their own handles.
I hardly think Hawley is a model of a trustworthy source these days.
Compromising of game accounts with real world monetary value is very much an industry, one with competition, customer service, supply chains, etc.

Source: I used to do customer service for Blizzard and a large part of our work was dealing with accounts compromised by gold sellers.
Yes. But there was so much money to be made and so much control of society to be gained, it was hard to prevent this.

> It's more urgent now than ever before to throw away all this baggage and start a WWW2 without these politicized entities and with lean clients maintainable by small groups of people.

Yes that would be great. But if we want libertarian world-wide network with services and rules that cannot be attacked by the establishment, it has to be either small and uninteresting to them, or it has to completely infeasible for them to attack it. Some new ideas are needed, because free software and open standards are apparently not enough to keep liberty alive on the internet.
Yeah, the idea that Parler was some free-speech bastion is nonsense. They were explicit and judicious with their use of the ban hammer to remove wrongthink from their platform - they just didn't consider the crazy and often extremely violent threats on their platform as wrongthink.
The optics are certainly bad. It looks like the Big Tech Cartel colluded to destroy one of their members closest competitors.
Ah, interesting. Thanks for the information.
The DRM thing is complicated. Before you condemn a person who wrote something kind and thoughtful, if it helps you to reconsider: Tim Berners-Lee's recent work seems to be driven by ideas with which Aaron Swartz (based on his own work) might agree. (And there's the whole thing of him earlier choosing to sit out the Web gold rush billions, and instead focus on stewardship of this tech platform for the world to communicate, from a university position.)
My understanding is that Parler's terms of service already included a prohibition against illegal activities. The question then becomes, does an up-an-comer social media service dedicated to encouraging free speech have the resources to handle a sudden flood of Twitter refugees? I'm perfectly willing to believe the answer is no.

I saw a representative of Parler being interviewed. She said that they rely on users reporting violations. Perhaps that doesn't scale. But it's unreasonable to think that the problem could be addressed, given 24 hours to do so.

If anything, malicious actors on Parler are second-rate amateurs. Whoever thinks organizing an uprising on a public platform that requires two-factor authentication (via ones cellphone) to join is doing the work of the police and prosecutors for them. If the tech giants and government were really so worried about this, Parler has just created for them the greatest honeypot for simpleminded, would-be insurrectionists ever. And they do have the resources to capitalize on it.
Was 4chan actually found to be culpable in organizing an illegal activity, or was that 8chan?
They thought China would in the footsteps of South Korea and Taiwan.
4chan is regularly censored and banned (not sure about hosting specifically, I only browse maybe once a month), and threads aren't available forever. It's a different kettle of fish to running a social network - you'd struggle to organise much of anything like this on 4chan.
You mean the same Glenn Greenwald who said Authoritarianism in US has nothing do with Trump? [1]

[1] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-threat-of-authoritarian...
Afaik their entire stack is built using AWS services.
For anyone who thought this was just about the recent events, you now know have your answer. It is undoubtedly a political war going on, driven by leftists at Big Tech.
You realize that by every form turning less ordered energy into ordered energy (themselves) and growing larger, they are by nature letting less be around for others. It's a zero sum game in that regard. Yes there are symbiotic relationships when looked at under a limited lens, but the above still holds.
Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook all have been used to (successfully) organize violence and still exist. They all host - and continue to host - content that violates the TOS of Apple, Google, and Amazon.

I think it takes particular mental acrobatics to say that Parler has not been unfairly singled out here.
I recall when I was going through a bout of insomnia in college, being upset by the quality of the ads on late night TV. I had been taught about what was then known as targeted advertising, and I thought that meant that all those inane ads were being specifically targeted at insomniacs. Like they had decided I was some sort of moron who would fall for this stuff. Didn't take me too long to realize the low quality ads were simply targeting the low-quality time slots. Nothing more sinister than cheap people being cheap.

But with real-time auctions, though, there are whole swaths of people whom the quality ads have decided are a waste of time, and now the hyenas can circle in to prey on everything that is left.

There are some ad networks out there that try to avoid the real time auction and cross-site tracking aspects of these conventional ad networks. I don't know how successful they're being, but maybe they're on to something. Something that should be encourage by public policy.
This reminds me of my layperson puzzlement:

Can we apply and verify the results from CERN experiments beyond experimental settings? If we can't, how can we know the results from CERN experiments aren't just artifacts of the experimental apparatuses?
It seems like there's at the very least a product-market fit for a cloud provider with less nebulous TOS. From the wording of the AWS contract, it sounds like the language is loose enough that any user can pretty much be terminated at whim.

If/when this lawsuit gets publicity, my guess is a lot of C-suite executives are gonna be looking over their shoulders and evaluating how screwed they'd be if their current cloud provider decided to deplatform them.

Amazon's probably counting on the fact that 99% of its customers' business doesn't have anything to do with politics, and therefore they'll write off the threat. But the counterpoint is that cancel culture has become so pervasive into people's personal lives that who knows what might happen.

If an executive shows up to a Trump-rally or posts a politically incorrect meme on his personal time, it's not outside the scope of possibility that AWS/GCP could demand that the company fire the person or else have their account terminated. The zeigeist is increasingly moving to the ideology that "silence is violence". Are companies, like Coinbase, that espouse political neutrality next?

Any company can now find itself on the wrong end of a cancel culture mob. If said mob has controls over your cloud providers TOS, then that's a major business risk.
What "single" post are you talking about?

Parler had thousands of offending posts and users and refused to moderate at all after being told to to be in compliance with various ToS.

It's no surprise that Amazon, Apple, Google, Twilio, etc., do not want to be associated with or support violent seditionists.
thumbnail.ninja was not available this was available for regular price.
Libertarian vs neoreactionary.

Whereas the Kochs want to be in charge of government, the Mercers want to eliminate government.
Even the beloved Western pet Navalny thinks banning Trump is wrong. I wonder if the American media will respond or just ignore it as usual.
> However, Friday night one of the top trending tweets on Twitter was “Hang Mike Pence.

This has been going on for 12 years. More evidence that both sides use Twitter for violence:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/14/violent...
Christchurch shooting in New Zealand. It was stomach churning, don't watch it.
I switched from iPhone to Fairphone mainly because of the fact that my last two iPhones became irreparable for what I regarded as stupid reasons.
I understand that's the claim, but on the other hand, the biggest Muslim ethnic group (Hui) aren't repressed.

Which makes you ask, what's the difference between Uyghurs and other Muslim minority groups like the Hui? Well, the biggest as far as I can tell is the influx of new, extremist ideologies like Wahhabism that are actually quite _incompatible_ with the indigenous culture. The reasons why that happened seem complex, but maybe you can say it's an unfortunate outcome of US and Russian meddling in the region over decades.

It's absolutely true that there's increased security and surveillance targeted at Uyghurs in the region, I've seen a lot of videos taken by travelers from the area that confirm that. There's also a coordinated and systemic program of re-education, as admitted by Chinese authorities. I'm sure there is a non-zero amount of abuses as part of this whole program, but I don't think that's the same thing as genocide. & I think the stated reason in their propaganda for _why_ this is all happening passes the smell test... Otherwise, wouldn't they be repressing Hui Muslims as well?

(Also see Tibet -- people said the same thing about Tibetan culture 20 years ago, but it's pretty well-understood now that there were foreign-funded separatist elements back then)
I think "with caveats" means any caveats you might personally hold.
I'm convinced of the same thing. I once had a rather enlightening conversation with an Agile consultant who had never read the manifesto. When I showed him, he said "I'm not sure I agree with this".
A court can definitely rule on the clauses of a contract, about time someone made some case law here on modern software agreements
> I didn't use the word "bizarrely"

Sorry, I meant "ironic".

> I've seen people arguing that the concept of free speech itself is "outdated" and that societies that hold it are "doomed to collapse", and that's just an example.

Maybe downvoted far down the thread, but the majority of the upvoted "censorship" discussions have been directly related to Big Tech's deplatforming of Trump & Parler in response to the capital attacks, and how the existing limits on US free speech apply to these decisions.
> why not just make it explicitly illegal

That violates freedom of speech
> Twitter doesn’t do hosting, so it wouldn’t ‘compete’ with AWS for customers?

Sure, the place were an agreement of restraint of trade would be more simply possible would be something like Twitter/FB.

Though if you had a Twitter/FB pact and AWS was brought in and agreed to kick off Twitter/FB competitors that didn’t voluntarily join the Twitter/FB pact, AWS could be part of the scheme…

And a Twitter/AWS agreement alone along the same lines could be problematic, if Twitter alone had market power.
> Also, 4chan exists why can’t Parler find a host?

They are trying to. The problem was that they were cut off by all of their services providers with next to no warning.
If we start compelling lawyers to provide legal counsel to clients, what protections do we afford those lawyers? In several cases over the last election, Judges threatened lawyers with sanctions and loss of right to practice for bringing forth clearly baseless lawsuits and wasting the court's time.

If we affirm that the right to legal counsel is a human right and that corporations also receive that right, how do we protect lawyers from clients which ignore legal counsel and file frivolous that can threaten the lawyer's right to practice law?
That's vague and could be used to ban any left wing politician that organised a March. Is that what you want?
I found Kara Swisher's interview with John Matze the CEO very informative on how things are handled (or lack thereof) on Parler.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/sway-kara-swisher...
Yeah I checked it out for a bit a few days after it launched, scrolled around for 10-20 min to see if it'd turn out like twitter, 8chan, or the_donald in terms of discussion and it was really weird. IDK how to even describe it other than that it seemed to have that MLM esque or truman show vibe where everything seemed strangely personal but also really shallow and performative? None of the discussions I saw felt natural. It was all super identity focused with very little policy discussion let alone material disagreement.
Yeah I see weird trending things a lot on Twitter then go to see what happening and it's people talking about the weird Trend they saw.
> Big Tech will at least pay lip service to the idea of moderation

You are not really watching if you think that is what is happening. They are controlling the narrative. They are promoting some topics and pushing down other. Facebook deleted WalkAway, a group that had full moderation, did not allow any posts which called for violence, and which was pure political speech. Reddit is deleting each and every sub that goes against what their management believes; over 2000 have been banned last year only.

They are not paying lip service. They are directing narrative. They are banning things they don't like. They are deciding which scientific exports are orthodox and which are banned. They are controlling language. They are controlling thought. If you don't think that's happening, then they are controlling your thoughts as well.

This is the most dangerous time for us to be in and this will not end well. Censorship is the tool of cowards. Censorship is the tool of authoritarians. We are literally watching Big Tech and Big Media openly rewrite history. We are in 1984 + Fahrenheit 451 and half of us have bought so far into this narrative of protectionism we do not see it at all.