skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The AWS censorship should be concerning for anyone who uses their services.
It's now clear that any business you have can be destroyed by a small, but vocal, group of people who don't like it for whatever reason.

What does this 'cut off' look like?

Do AWS make your site inaccessible to the public, but still give you access to your data?

Do they waive the data egress fees so that you can pull everything down locally?
Further, the difference between this and how Duckduckgo uses Bing is that DDG does a proper proxy without forwarding your IP or any info about you.
I am not, facebook.com is not facebook's home, it's their place of business and it's "critical infrastructure" at this point. It's very different to your house. Zuckerberg and/or you can make rules for your respective actual residence(s) all you want. You have "editorial control" and the associated liability over who comes to your home and what happens in it. facebook.com does not. You will be thrown in prison when somebody uses your kitchen to plan violent attacks, facebook (or Zuckerberg) is not thrown in prison when somebody uses a facebook group to do the same.

I also do not agree that corporations are people, in general.
Jason Scott: « A l’origine, Flash est d’abord un média »
It's more about how such an objectively bad interface can be so popular.

I'm genuinely curious if there is something good here that I am missing.

And no, I'm not going to just get over it or install another app to compensate for it.
"And exactly why universal free speech is needed. Because otherwise that same excuse will be made every time."

What is universal free speech except a desire to have the government dictate what companies can have on their platform?

If Google supported fascism, yes, I would want an alternative. I wouldn't support them.

I would sell my phone. I wouldn't be surprised if they started removing apps that didn't conform to their ideology.

But here's the thing. This social network does not moderate people posting about killing their political enemies.

I would not defend your hypothetical Google's right to support a hateful ideology.
Rule #1 on the internet: the more a website screams something, the less it's true.

Examples:

"Our mission is to organize the world's information." (proceeds to organize the world's commercial brands and spam people based on what they do online)

"We value freedom of speech." (proceed to literally ban the president, wrong opinions and alternative apps like Parler)

"We value your privacy." (Every big"tech"/cloud company ever that sells your data and has an automated system in place to pass all data on to the NSA, authorities and anybody willing to buy data)

"Download now" (not actually now, but after you get our download manager adware/cryptolocker)

"Download full functional version for free now" (actually a limited trial that you get to use after you dump personal info)

"Free trial, unlimited music downloads, cancel any time" (proceed to charge your credit card even though you cancelled the limited DRM download service on time. I'm looking at you Amazon Music)
Killing section 230 would force social media sites to choose between censoring according to their whims but then being on the hook for everything, or delegating censorship to the law.

I think there is a valid argument to be made that Twitter is not like a TV station, but more like television itself. Suppose all television had a strong political bias into some direction, that would be an unacceptable situation.
> I don't believe in free speech without limits.

This. I have started to believe that although free speech is very important, it is only possible to have full free speech in a society where there is not too much hostility between groups. Otherwise it has become too easy to manipulate people, both in your own group and in groups that you are opposed to.
> My issue is that I don't trust Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and other SV CEOs to decide what should be deplatformed

I don’t either. Which is an argument for breaking at least one of those up.

That said, as long as we have freedom of assembly, and as long as political views are not a protected class, this will be a thing. The best protection against it running wild is a vocal minority who question it each time it’s done, to hopefully swing the majority when it goes overboard.

> while BLM, antifa and the like are promoted by most of the major media channels, groups like occupy wall street are being quieted

Was it? I thought it got lots of coverage. I went down to see it a few times, and from the in-person perspective, the whole thing was cute but loopy. Nobody in charge meant zero coördination or sense of direction or priority.

Antifa is a bit like that, which is why you don’t see much policy coming out of it. There isn’t a policy ask. BLM, on the other hand, has identifiable founders and identifiable local leaders in many cities. That keeps it focussed and effective.
People becoming millionaires just isn't a common outcome anywhere. But moving from poverty to middle class is maybe the more important one.

America is objectively bad at both.
This is difficult. Had to go through this myself last year. Went from 10 people to 2. How people are informed about it,at least initially,is very important. We had to do it over zoom,which is complete shit. It probably made it worse knowing that the people will unlikely to get jobs soon.
> Now they are at the mercy of Cloudflare, ProtonMail, Wordpress

WordPress is open source software, not a company or platform. No one can stop anyone else from using it, provided they have some sort of hosting.

You may be thinking of WordPress.com, run by Automattic? Disclosure: I work there. :)
Mostly they hold up well, but there are occasional surprises to the modern reader - the character of Isaac in Ivanhoe is a horrible anti-semitic caricature. Although his daughter Rebecca isn't. The presentation of Robin Hood has to have been hugely influential on the 20th century view of him. And of course Scott is responsible for the "highland revival", and all the tartan and shortbread parts of the Scottish tourist industry.

I'm slightly surprised that nobody has attempted to film Waverly, maybe it will happen after the success of Outlander.
That's actually not true: https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/first-amendment-center...

“the more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.”
I think the ps thing has nothing to do with romance languages. Germans say it the same way. It's just because English is odd here.
Old forests better retain water and thus are able to grow better - marginally accumulate more biomass. I'm NOT against planting trees but against overdoing it as I explain in the other comment.

https://envirobites.org/2019/09/24/old-is-better-than-young-...
I'm in the U.K. and I need some help understanding what is happening here. I'm a big left winger too, (but British socialism respects the sovereignty of parliament. Or it used to). Anyway, why can I not install this app now? I checked and it is not in the U.K. play store. Your president did something bad, and now I am not allowed some app? And the president and his supporters have been wiped from social media? I can't even go and see what the did to cause this?
That's probably true, but when a forest is burned, that's decades of absorbed CO2 that goes back to the atmosphere, which would take another decades to be absorbed by the new trees.
> Why do BLM-affiliated events get a pass, with the criminal elements written off as a small fringe?

I suspect that this has something to do with the fact that the President of the United States incited a riot rather than it being something that happened along with the protest.
So because they have a better alternative for some people, this suddenly is "problematic for millions of people"? And the alternative is what? Having everyone get the Spyware version?

I would reword your comment as "this is beneficial to hundreds of millions of people".
> objectively bad interface

Does such a thing exist? What is objectively bad about twitter's interface? I just think it's made for one thing (close to real-time communication), and you think it's should be good for another (review of old content).
America is the 27th best country for social mobility. Who could have guessed that free access to healthcare and education matters.

https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index...
http://www.temporarilyembarrassedmillionaires.org/
I think you are missing the point of my comment. I didn’t single out the mainstream media, I used the Times as an example. The same would apply to any media source that “invited violence.”
Nope. It still applies to all users not in the EU.
Tarring all news outlets with the same brush isn't helpful here. Twitter, Facebook, HN, reddit, you name it, have all had their fair share of sending an unjustified angry mob at someone.
Patreon has its own issues. I wished it would be less dominant in the English-speaking donation 'market'.

I was hoping that Flattr would be able to provide a Chromium-free, 'Brave-like' experience, especially with their browser plugin, but if anything it has been losing popularity (despite being years older than Patreon!).

For a reason that escapes me, they even recently decided to officially remove their plugin, so now they can even hardly be differentiated from the other Patreon-likes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15557954

https://github.com/flattr/flattr-extension/
You’re confusing objectivity with subjectivity.
Young people are less violent then they used to be. It is not just about their share in population, they behave less violently then young people 50 years ago.
If good news happens a month after they are gone and you want to hire them back are they willing to come back or do they continue to find a job elsewhere?
Snide comments tend to get such a reception, regardless of which side they are promoting. I am sure "Many colleges would find it difficult to arrange for Ben Shapiro to speak on their campuses" would be received much better than what you wrote.
No concern, I just wanted to provide an example for what is currently happening in Whatsapp and Telegram (private groups where illegal content got posted, became known and caused the state to try to get rid of those groups and punish members).
I've seen people doubt the GDPR a lot, but when I ask why, it's always some version of "Oh EU, government meddling in business something something". Most replies even seem to think the GDPR does things it doesn't do and be against those imagined drawbacks.

I've never seen a substantive reason, so my prior for "person with GDPR complaint" now is "person who isn't familiar with the GDPR".
Most definitely though Mojeek was the first on that front and yes, the search index is entirely from crawling the web independently. UK based. Our Twitter handle is very responsive if you ever need further info.
I think it really depends on "why" or "what" do you try to gain/understand/fix with these books. If you are looking for things to inspire action in a direction you already decided you want to go then maybe self-help books can be a fuel to inspire action.

More concrete I think most of self-help books should not exists or should only be (maybe) a long form blog post. They recycle the same ideas. Very few of them have really original, breakthrough ideas that could really be helpful or illuminating in a sense. Of course I did not read all of them and as this category of books is very large, I might be very very wrong.

I started reading these kind of books when they began (or at least when I discovered them) like 15 years ago. And the 10 years ago I stopped. The reason for stopping is that I discovered that a lot of them contains very old ideas, ideas that can be found in mythology, religion and in the works of philosophers.

Here are some examples of what I find inspiring:

I reading Norse and Greek mythology and try to think about them as people trying to talk in a symbolic way about human nature. Can be seen that these gods were divine but also human. And for example the main idea I take from this is that it is normal to not be perfect, to have inspiring days and bad days.

I am reading Stoics and finding there inspiration about how to look at hard things when they come, what is an actionable point of view (making a difference between what is in my control and what not), about how to manage emotions and what does this mean. I recommend for example reading Seneca 'Letter from a Stoic'. I covers a wide range of life matters.

I am planning to read these days Arthur Schopenhauer "Wisdom of Life" and maybe start reading Decartes Meditations to start digging into what can be known or not.

This is what inspires me and it might not speak the same to you. Also reading some of them multiple times in different periods of time brings me different meanings and inspiration. I trust more these works which stood the test of time written by people who were thinking about such matters for long time, than a book written in 2 months.

I am not saying that these self-help books are bad. But rather that they are too many to have time to distinguish between them.
I'm reading HN for quite some time now and there is no a day go by that I would not see a political post.

I'm not American so I don't really follow facts of your political leaders or your racial/gender problems that your government is trying to address. I consider myself neutral and I would love to see no political posts on HN. They tend to spread into flame wars and as far as I can see bring no real value apart from people venting here..

And I think for that reason you should ban everyone who does politics, either if they hate or love one side or another. Strictly no politics. I love HN for its tech stuff, not political.
That obviously depends with what happens with the trees that could not have been preserved.
If you burn a tree you set almost it's entire absorbed CO2 free.
On the other hand, a recently planted tree has absorbed almost nothing - it will take decades if not longer to grow to a big one - reaching the level of absorbed CO2 of the other tree before it has been burned.

Nevertheless, a tree at the place of an older one can help binding CO2 when the old tree is used such that the CO2 is not released to the atmopshere, such as for a well-crafted table (which could be used for decades, too).
But don't forget that it usually is not just removing one tree - usually big areas are cut out, which includes the huge ecosystems around trees in untouched nature.

Though, always keep in mind, this is not a choice. The goal should be to preserve as much as possible (especially untouched ecosystems) as well as planting as much as possible.
Tiny Satellites That Will Connect Cows, Cars and Shipping Containers to the Net
How much would you be willing to pay for search as a premium service?
You're giving the president here way more leeway than is necessary.

The leave in peace video clearly had a subtext (he mentioned the election being stolen no less than 3 times in the video) and was not aimed at subduing the crowd at all. Furthermore, the later video where he said that the trespassers would be prosecuted is clearly scripted/edited (from the monotone and cuts in the filming), and likely happened because of some strong-arming (how else did he go from "we will never concede" to admitting defeat in a single day?)

My best guess as to what happened there was that Mitch McConnell (or someone else) figured that he could whip enough votes to impeach & convict if need be and Trump, facing potential consequences, reluctantly decided to play ball.
While it is a point, the fact is that other Nordic countries, Benelux, and France all have similar attitudes to the work-life balance, and not all of them have access to infinite money like Norway does.
One big point that would be useful is to help the fired engineer find another job. A lot of this is, as Aqua mentioned, an exercise for their conscience. The best way to alleviate it is to "do right" by the fired engineer and help them find another position. Likely would have been about as much work as this whole spiel.

Of course, OP has no requirement to do anything for them, but the easiest way to make yourself feel less bad is to make the results less bad for the person affected. Doing all of this did nothing for the person fired, except get them fired.

This would only really be feasible for a small team, such as this.
Third party apps can handle payment however they want (e.g. gambling apps) but I would expect apps downloaded from the play store not to work if they are connect via play services
> you absolutely want them regulated and managed by a democratic authority too... Why is Twitter different?

If my sewage or plumbing stop working, I get sick and die. If my Twitter stops working, nothing...I am not on Twitter. Lots of countries (e.g. Japan) do fine with a private postal service. And plenty (e.g. Panama or America in the era of free banking) do fine outsourcing their currency.

I am not saying Twitter shouldn’t be regulated. Just that this isn’t the argument for it.
The president could for example call to a press conference.

The internet is still rather open - parler could start a web site or give out a magazine.

The possible venues of free speech are numerous.
No. Arguments that are trivial types can still depend on other objects not being destroyed.

void foo(const char* str) {
if (*str == '\0') return;
printf("%c", str[0]);
std::string x = str + 1;
return foo(x.c_str());
}
You don't see the irony of censoring a leftie in a thread that complains about the right getting censored by a 'left-wing witch hunt' do you?

I have had plenty of interesting debates on here; when it comes to politics however, HN has a certain bias and an ideological blind spot. The narrative that the left is censoring everybody while you have Republican legislators passing this[1] is laughable, yet the narrative persists because it's not being challenged.

I do try to see the other side[2] when I think it makes sense. Playing victim of the left while a right-wing mob just stormed the Capitol is not one of these times, sorry.

The cynic in me thinks this is what YC wants; it promotes the sort of thinking on which VC thrives. I have little reason to believe otherwise. There's few people on HN challenging these narratives and now there's even fewer.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws#Anti-BDS_laws_in...

2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25691631
Yeah for me it’s akin to being mad about being kicked out of my house if you spout off anti-Semitic things. It’s my house. My domain. My rules. You can go elsewhere and speak that garbage. Scale that idea up and you get where I’m coming down on all of this: Twitter, Facebook, AMazon, Apple etc are all for profit companies that can limit speech as they see fit and not be in violation of federal free speech guarantees.
> As heartless as this may seem...

It's not heartless, it's just stupid. It's like screwing in a lightbulb with a hammer.

> And I didn’t want to do the task so, consciously ignoring Mr. Weinberg, I transformed the ordeal into an optimization problem, for which I wrote an application to help me with.

Treating people like robots is probably the worst way to solve people ops problems. It's like managers learned nothing from the failures of stack ranking, whiteboard interviews, brain teasers, and other similar "optimization" methods. These ill-judged solutions show a clear misunderstanding of the scope and context of the problem at hand.

In fact, it's pretty antithetical to being a good engineer.
Ask HN: Is climate change already irreversible?
After watching David Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet, I gave a long thought about the possibilities. What I feel being in a developing country is that, it is very tough for the government to make significant changes for slowing climate change here. People are focused about food, jobs, better living first.
It seems likely that that blog post is wrong in that detail, given that pretty much everyone else says that making JPGs progressive reduces the file size.
GitHub issues let you attach videos since last month: https://github.blog/changelog/2020-12-16-video-upload-public...
And? 24 people died from last year's left wing riots.
Thanks but the audience is family & friends. Basically a solution for small circles of people that don't want to share their private images/videos on Google, Facebook, Flickr or similar.

I don't think metadata will be a bottleneck in this scenario.. but maybe I am just naïve here.

I also consider just running a small box in the basement with dynamic dns instead of using a VPS.
Is there an easy way to download all of Wikipedia?

I’m guessing it is one of the first things set up on Mars :)
But that person is right. Most of the arguments against private companies banning companies/individuals violating their ToS boil down to something along the lines of "this is a slippery slope, we're on our way to tyranny". But all European countries have limits on free speech and the vast majority are free countries, so all of these arguments are demonstrably false. We don't even have to look to other countries for examples, there has been censorship of various kinds at various times in the US since its founding, and yet there was no inevitable slide to Orwellian tyranny after each instance. The problem is that Americans are far too paranoid—every little thing is perceived an existential threat to you people.
What? It's been extraordinary rare to even get a geniouse to fix a laptop for me at all. They wanted $800 to fix an issue I repaired myself for $10 with a keyboard ribbon.

They have tried leveraging and taking advantage of my elderly mother on several occasions.

I'm often unsatisfied by apple and avoid them when I can. LG Gram is such a better computer imho.
Then they need to challenge it at the time they are changed, and not after the election regulated by those laws have already happened. You could still challenge them now, but it would flagrant assault on democratic principles to use this as an excuse to not count votes cast according to these rules.

There have been plenty of much more questionable elections in the past. 2000 is a big one. In 2004 there were a lot of hints that Diebold voting machines favoured Republican candidates. Still, those elections stood, because the votes had already been cast. If rules are unfair, change them, but don't demand the election gets blindly thrown your way for no good reason.
The question is - is it OK to shut people/companies down who themselves don’t believe in free speech?

Sometimes you have to silence people to let everyone else have their rights. And that’s what is happening here.

Trump supporters don’t support free speech or freedom of expression as a concept to be applied to everyone. They just want to have free speech themselves and for everyone else to shut up.
"That's why education is the most important pillar of democracy. Education is everything. "

The kind of people who get into positions of power - well, my impression is that they think they know better. Even if they are aware of the fact that in 1930 someone fucked up, they will not entertain the fact that they themselves might do the same.

Also, some events are really complex. You can educate people about the 1929 or 2008 economic crises from very different perspectives, from far-left to libertarian, and the lessons will be very different.
If those users cared about this they would’ve voted for legislation similar to the gdpr.