skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah why downvote this? Ppl buying minimal amounts of marijuana (and other selectively enforced misdemeanors) are doing real time while members of a violent mob walk free. And not only are they all on camera, but there may even be SIGINT collection devices that have their phone ID info.

I don’t usually engage in politics on HN, but I think this goes beyond politics. How are we not supposed to be angry, after watching ppl be gassed and shot with rubber bullets, about how the Capitol Police responded 6 Jan? This is much bigger than politics.
People on the left are mistaken if they think this is going to help. Someone somewhere in the country will plot something. We are playing with fire with these type of restrictions, root causes are not being solved. 75 million people voted for Donald Trump.
I have an extensive recent personal history with looking to people like linus tech tips for laptop reccs, buying a dell xps as they suggest and then experiencing they are awful compared to anything made 10 years ago
The Platform Is the Enemy
There are a lot more people on Parler already than there are fascists.

Consider what this looks - and feels - like from their perspective.

I’m actively watching people I grew up with who have never been involved in politics at all become increasingly aware of this push. Do you think they’re going to be open to liberalism when this is their first interaction with it as an ideology?
Great to see another developer going for the same type of crazy building idea I play in my head.

Today I live in an apartment but that was definitely something I would love to have in a house with a backyard!

Looking forward to see the finished piece and all the best with the triplets, as a father I can imagine how fun it is going to be!! :)
And HEIF is to HEVC/h.265. HEIF is the default photo format for iPhones, which virtually guarantees its future success.
Gab announced a phone today.
Funny, I’m pretty sure it just did, as it has for the last 4 years of abject defeats the judiciary has been handing out to Trump. Good luck with your lynching fantasies, sounds like you’ll need it to get through the next 4 years.
No. What is this garbage whataboutism of "both the extreme left and extreme right"?
You need to do a lot more reading on what the Nazis actually did. I'll start you off with a hint, though: No. What "the left" is doing now bears no resemblance to the actions of the Nazi Party.
I'd be more than willing to overlook their degeneracy if they would stop trying to shove their lifestyle down our throats.
Nah, terrorists announce shit on Twitter.
So does twitter, as long as the violent content targets the correct people.
You don't think the radical left is a problem that the far right is feeding off of? Then the cycle goes on. They both feed off each other.
Not many people anywhere make 300-400k. It’s a lot of money. 200k is a lot of money. You are doing great. As long as you can do what you enjoy the money isn’t a big deal anyway. 200k is waaay above what the average programmer makes. Im guessing you know this and your insecurity doesn’t stem from compensation directly, but an indirect prestige and “am I doing enough” type thoughts.
Hosting companies have been doing this long before the app store or twitter existed. You just didn't hear about it.
Please don't. It's against the site guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Those are Latin words, drawn from a Latin source

No, "Lorem" is "dolorem" with the first part chopped off, "adipiscing" and "elit" are mangled non-words, too, and so on.

"Pencil what correct horse battery staple" can be called a sequence of English words. If someone who doesn't know what they're doing writes "ncil what correctando taple", though, then you're no longer in a position to say, "Those are English words".
Amazon has announced they are pulling Parler off their web infrastructure. They are free to rent their own hosting from another provider, or buy their own computers and peer to the internet.
You're not. The near ubiquitous rebuttal I keep reading to the actions of Twitter, Apple, etc. are juvenile slippery slope fallacies.
so was the FDA?
Discussions are naturally taking this move to hypothetical extremes, but Apple's stance doesn't seem very inconsistent with previous actions. They're not demanding that Parler moderate anything and everything on their platform, but they aren't ready to allow a completely unmoderated platform that features blatant calls to violence and suggestions to execute public officials.

For what it's worth, it appears to be working. Parler is starting to remove the most egregious calls to violence, such as Lin Wood's famous call to prepare firing squads to use against the Vice President of the United States: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/parler-reportedly-removed-pos...
This is what "cloud" means.
I don't think that type of language helps anything. Are you suggesting that conservatism is now synonymous with fascism?

It seems ludicrous to suggest that millions of conservatives across the US are fascists. It isn't productive nor does it offer any solutions for people to communicate, resolve their differences, and coexist.
Yep. Minutes behind. Curious to see how long this knocks Parler offline.
The Lightning plug came with all the limitations from Apple. That’s what they wanted to avoid.
Extremely obscure dark corners of the web have always existed. They're not novel, and in general they have not been particularly dangerous as their niche is extremely small.
Facebook and Twitter have been hosting violent content for years and years. Facebook has contributed to mass murder. Twitter to countless suicides. Far more deaths can be attributed to their platforms than some goofy right wing startup. These are facts. Big Tech's scale and power means they can exempt themselves from the rules they create.

Are you really telling me Mark Zuckerberg has less blood on his hands than this John Matze guy? After literal genocides were coordinated via WhatsApp?
It seems everything is. HN can't be immune from macro trends, unfortunately.
I donated to Sanders. I haven't been drinking either flavor of kool aid.
Onboarding that guy on any alternative platform would be a huge marketing coverage and grow in userbase for the said platform. I wonder if a company will try to play this card.
The left’s ideas can’t win in an open marketplace. So this is what they do instead.
> Information channels based on political ideology.

Is credible threats of violence, especially towards elected officials, a "political ideology" that deserves protection and promotion?

You make it out as if this is an attact on Republicans or conservatists. It's not. It's an attack on extremists who are posting credible threads of extreme harm and violence on others. Is banning ISIS from platforms enough of a "slippery slope" that would prevent the ban?
The President gave a speech on Wednesday, to a mob, in which he called for the violent overthrow of the US government.

It has been three days.

Have you already forgotten?
You can’t label everything you disagree with as extremism. Advocate for the destruction of Israel on the basis that the Muslim god said so? That’s extremism. Holding different political views? That’s part of being a healthy and diverse society.

I wish Americans would grow up and learn to coexist.
What was their reasoning? I only saw this.

Amazon declined to comment on the suspension.
I wrote a response to this a few months ago that others may be interested in:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24258193

Largely I am baffled, because the end result seems worse in almost every way than the starting point of HTML.
I think you are right but people aren't thinking long term.

This will force people into camps and the camps will not see each other creating a massively re-enforcing echo chamber that will further inflame things.

That said, while I do vigorously support free political speech -even disagreeable political speech (if you don't then it's "speech I agree with"), unfortunately, you have people who don't know where to draw the line and cross into vile threats and other heinous crime.

It's a case of why we can't have nice things. A few people ruin it for the many.

But yeah, this is going to be disastrous for us. However, the social media companies and the regular media made this bed and they are happy swines right now.

I hope other countries wise up to especially social media platforms (be they from the US, China, Russia, etc) and build their own to avoid having large countries influence how smaller countries should conduct themselves.

That is basically, a few corporations are setting the tone of discussion for all people except China, North Korea and Iran (who, in retrospect, "wisely" banned them). That's not a good thing.

They are the culture barons and they are not shy about using their power to steer things.
Apple's stance is very consistent with their history of inconsistent action. Where Apple sees a problem, they act.
No, it's not. AWS is saying "we don't believe that your volunteer moderators are gonna do their jobs, and you've already screwed up, and your CEO is out there saying he thinks this doesn't matter." That's a very different thing than "thou must have professional moderators".

Professional moderation is an option, but what you are actually obliged to do is ensure that your platform is not a hotbed of violent content. There are a lot of approaches to that, including aggressive bans of nuts before they get a critical mass. Given that Parler is where the nuts go when they get booted off Twitter, that was never in the cards.
Silencing a large chunk of the population because they felt they were on the moral high ground is exactly what the Nazis did. I dont need to brush up on that part of history thank you though.
Amazon Is Booting Parler Off of Its Web Hosting Service
AWS's reasoning is included in the article; a direct copy of their email to Parler is quoted.

> Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms. It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service. It also seems that Parler is still trying to determine its position on content moderation. You remove some violent content when contacted by us or others, but not always with urgency. Your CEO recently stated publicly that he doesn’t “feel responsible for any of this, and neither should the platform.” This morning, you shared that you have a plan to more proactively moderate violent content, but plan to do so manually with volunteers. It’s our view that this nascent plan to use volunteers to promptly identify and remove dangerous content will not work in light of the rapidly growing number of violent posts. This is further demonstrated by the fact that you still have not taken down much of the content that we’ve sent you. Given the unfortunate events that transpired this past week in Washington, D.C., there is serious risk that this type of content will further incite violence.
Breakthrough tech makes DNA data storage more practical and scalable
> “[W]e cannot provide services to a customer that is unable to effectively identify and remove content that encourages or incites violence against others,”

This seems to be the standard
Where do we draw the line on how we censor the internet? Obviously actual terrorist group sites can and should be taken down, but this feels like it's getting more murky than that.

- Should we be okay with Facebook censoring these groups?

- Should we be okay with Google censoring search results?

- Should we be okay with Apple censoring apps?

- Should we be okay with AWS censoring websites?

- Should we be okay with GoDaddy censoring domains?

- Should we be okay with Verizon censoring internet traffic?

Giant corporations aren’t simply following court orders, they are acting on their own now. This is problematic for a multitude of reasons. The precedent has been established.

*

EDIT:
By "actual terrorist groups" I mean those that are classified as such by the US Government (e.g. FBI, CIA, NSA). While I think QAnon and Proud Boys have many of the characteristics of a terrorist group, they are not classified as such (personally I think they should be, but it's the government's job to decide that).

*
This proves the multi-cloud advocates were right! If Parler used Kubernetes, they could migrate more quickly. /joke
I have no interest in defending this woman. However, it appears that onions are a home remedy for being tear gassed or experiencing other chemical irritants.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/elizabeth-knoxville-onion-...
>Apple/Google think Twitter has good enough responses to reported violations.

Maybe, or maybe they just don't like Parler. I'm skeptical whether a serious attempt to clean up violent speech would ever satisfy these platforms, especially when what constitutes violent speech is determined by people who are extremely ideologically hostile and uncharitable towards you (eg. see how Twitter construed Trump's last tweets.) But we'll never know because I don't expect such a reform effort to be made.
I’m sure yandex, alibaba, tencent and many more smaller us hosters will be happy to host them.
Everything but appeasement with these people is "playing with fire". 82 million people are tired of it.
I'd compare it to the "red scare," except at no point during that era did "reds" storm Congress and set up a noose outside.

Red-caps, on the other hand...

Perhaps there is a situation where a society says "no further" and is correct to actively shun a political stance. In fact, that's been true in the US for decades... It's real hard to be a KKK chapter without pulling a lot of FBI scrutiny.
Please stop posting ideological flamebait to HN. Comments that take threads, and the site, further into hell are just what we're trying to avoid here. You've been doing this a lot lately, and we ban such accounts, regardless of which politics you favor or disfavor.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Trump wound them up with lies and conspiracies and urgency two hours before they went to the capital on his recommendation. This is certainly provoking unlawful behavior or urging someone to behave unlawfully which is the definition of incitement.

The defendants will unquestionably be using the "Trump told us to" defense.

Trump violated the terms more often and worse than regular people who were removed from the platform. Thousands of regular people kicked off for violating the terms and it's Donald Fucking Trump and Parler that gets folks in an uproar? Over things that happen all the time? By long standing service agreements? What?
radicalization is now part of mainstream culture, but I don’t understand the double standard, giving e.g. the “white supremacists” conspiracy by the left prime time on all the networks, but censoring conservatives (and they have no lack of dumb conspiracies of course), but why only one side is silenced and shut down?

Free speech apparently is only free if it agrees with the ‘party line’ these days.
It's a good question, but for the record, I'm fine with the line being somewhere before Parler, which is full of people plotting political assassinations.

This happened to Gab.ai, too, but it happened after one of those plotters committed a mass murder, one he advertised on Gab, at the Tree of Life synagogue.
That’s a very subjective chart and by their own admission doesn’t even try to compare for honesty or credibility. Most of the two R columns routinely run fake or highly selective coverage to a degree which only Democracy Now and certain HuffPost writers approach.

There is an enormous difference between an outlet like the New Yorker, which is definitely liberal but also fiercely committed to fact checking, and outlets like Newsmax or The American Conservative which are proudly movement conservatives first and journalists second, if at all.

This desire to present a false equivalence is understandable - it makes it easier to avoid acknowledging a major schism in the country - but the misrepresentations requires are a disservice to their readers. Just the fact that The Economist is listed as leftist to the same degree that The Post Millenial or NY Post are listed as right wing tells you how interested they are in accuracy!
This is a good use case I have been explaining my customers. Be ready to for a swift “de loud” action.
No provider wants the cesspool to be pinned on them. I get that emotionally, but this is nuts. Obviously they have the right to make these moves, but god knows what happens when the new administration starts reflecting on the role played by Big Tech in this mess. Washing hands long after infection, so to speak.

What happens when congress uses these moves as evidence that Big Tech acknowledges the need to take responsibility for harmful content and then expects the same moves made for much smaller stakes?
Someone in another comment pointed out that Trump can release press releases or call a press conference if he chooses, or give a speech from the Oval Office. Let’s explore that. If he uses the old media tools and goes on national TV to start directing insurrectionists to the next target, what then? Do we agree that they have a responsibility to cut him off?

The social networks and now Google and Apple are faced with an evolving volatile situation where the tools they supply are being used to foment an insurrection. They are taking steps to get ahead of what may happen in the event of Trump’s removal next week. Time is of the essence.

There will be time for more nuanced discussion when emotions have cooled. Now is emphatically not the time to try to have those discussions. We need to get through the next several weeks first.
It’s almost like persuasion and dialogue is the only recourse to settling differences. Unless you want to resort to violence (which I’m told the anti-insurrectionists would /never/ do something so immoral).
Before pontificating so very much about what "free speech" is, would it be too much to ask if I requested that you learn the most basic concepts about free speech, and also figure out that actions by Twitter have no relevance whatsoever to the freedom of expression as defined in the First Amendment?
Maybe you should find the worst comments on parler, voat, and thedonald.win then take them around to print shops and see if everyone prints them.
I wouldn't be so doubtful. The Pirate Bay seems to always come back no matter what.
There were no endless attacks on federal property, and there was no organized movement to disturb the peaceful transition of power, nor overthrowing a democratically elected government. Don't peddle lies.
You are correct, Stripe didn’t start selling physical card readers until 2018.
I've been seeing this take a lot, generally without counter recommendations. If ejecting extremists from polite society is not an option, then what is?

Some have suggested seeing things from their perspective, and engaging with them in some way. However, it is clear that they do not want to argue in good faith, and have become completely separated from logic and reality.

No action at all is a decision in favor of the status quo, with the obvious outcomes. What, then, is the alternative?
I wanted to play around with websockets last year, so I started out by building out a prototype multiuser whiteboard in a few hours one weekend. From that, I decided it'd be cool to turn it into a game, so I built out a drawing/guessing game from there and got it up on a domain I'd been sitting on for a while (https://www.multiplayer.com.au/)

It's got some mild polish on it now, but there's still a lot of scenarios where disconnects/reconnects or generally unexpected behaviour can break the current game room. One of my goals this year is to address all the remaining bugs, add some more UI polish, then look into working on bots to seed a single game room because right now if you land on the game and no one else playing, you're met with a "please wait for another player to join" screen. This essentially means that it's BYO friends for the most part right now.

Later in the year when the current game has been fully-baked, I'm sure I'll come up with some other random idea to try and it'll end up as another half-baked game to put up there.
Considering their target audience, yes.
Easy come, easy go!
Oracle should scoop them up, lot of AWS customers have moved to OCI which is also cheaper in cost.
Parlor was literally not moderating calls to kill elected officials and disturb the electoral process.
Stripe was not the first to do something like this with an audio jack, but honestly it shows how important/useful open and standards can be.

It’s even more a shame to see them replaced by proprietary or extremely complex standards. For example the complexity of web standards has pretty much reduced browsers to only a very small number of browser engines.
I suppose you mean "because they had sold a bit of it before" - sure. And someone else has bought it off them and will have lost.
I see the point you're making. If we deconstruct the whole matter and look at it from an existential point of view, humans are incredibly constrained in their freedoms by the nature of our existence. In a fundamental way, our language and culture predetermines what we can think and how we think, and our environment is probably a bigger impediment to freedom of speech and thought than anything else.

But from a policy perspective on the ground, I think the ideal of freedom of speech should eclipse the concerns of private platforms wherever possible. But this is not to say we should not police the boundaries of free speech. In fact, if we had a more strict enforcement policy about unprotected speech like direct threats (such as L. Lin Wood's declaration that people should execute Mike Pence by firing squad [0]), we might not need these platform interventions at all.

[0]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/secret-service-says-...
I understand that it is a pretty-ok image for playing with image processing stuff, but do you not think that using literal porn might breed a bad atmosphere in a professional environment?

I'm definitely guilty of using the image, I still occasionally use it on my home computer if I'm playing with image processing stuff, but I purposefully do not use it for anything that any other human is likely to see, since I don't want to be the reason to make someone feel unwelcome in the tech space.
No? It means that if you support CHAZ/CHOP and condemn the Capitol events then youre a partisan hack.

Either you want peace and prosperity or you don’t. You can’t cherry-pick your stance towards law based on who’s breaking it.

There’s nothing hard to understand about it, but then again people love to play dumb in questions like these. I don’t understand it to be honest.
Counter argument: having dedicated moderation might just be the low bar, in the same way that there is the expectation that you pay your employees a reasonable salary or pay for other services required to run your business. If you can't afford to do these basic things you may not have a viable business model.

Aside: is Moderation as a Service the new shovel to be sold during the gold rush?
I’ve warned on the same point. I hope notice is taken before it’s too late.
The short term calculus seems pretty clear: if a service is unable to moderate conversations that are inciting and planning imminent violence that undermines the fabric of democratic society (aka inauguration or the disruption of the transfer of power over the next 12 days), its better to shut it off than keep it around in case that violence comes to pass. Precautionary principle applies and a circuit breaker goes off.

This is a special case that sits within a much broader question of where, how, and whether speech is regulated online. We clearly haven't gotten very far along in that discussion yet, but society needs time to even be able to have that conversation intellectually and legislatively. If a peaceful and orderly transition of power is unable to occur, unfortunately we may never be given that time.