skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Running a datacenter, especially at scale, is expensive as hell.

I helped build one out, which was later acquired, but I wouldn't think it would take more than a couple of cages of equipment in a colo facility to host Parler, especially in these relatively early days. Maybe I'm completely out of touch.
They are. I should know. I've worked as one for years including big tech companies. For e.g. FB has a lower pay than SWE, lower RSUs etc. and you can only get SWE pay if you transition into one, and that requires you to go through an interview process internally.
Looking at the history of slavery and prison labour in the US, I'm not sure I share your optimism. Many new (and victimless) crimes were introduced after slavery was abolished, and slavery was never abolished in prisons. Locking someone up for "vagrancy" and then forcing them to work for you does sound an awful lot like slavery.
- That USB connector in some dark recess of your car.

The ergonomics of reaching it from the driver seat while fully seated in that seat must be an interesting study.

I owned one car long enough to be able to get the connection on the first try multiple times.

On the USB-A plug you can see inside, so if there's no logo you can go by the plastic tab inside the connector, usually white or blue plastic. The tabs have to be on complementary sides.
> The basis for the 5V power negotiation on USB is extremely silly.

This may be true for wall chargers but not devices capable of supplying power to peripherals while on battery power themselves.

For example, an external hard drive should not have to figure out that a large tablet can power it, while a phone won't, though trial and error, by attempting to spin up the disks multiple times.
Apropos nothing, your username has taught me a new word of Dutch.

^_^
> In the case of Steam Mobile Authenticator the new output format was reverse engineered by various developers

Oh, so it was a custom one! Was convinced that it was a less used standard algo.
Yes, by remaining small-tech.

It's basically like how the US keeps airstriking "the leader of Al-Quaeda" every six months. If you're high profile enough, and causing trouble to enough people, eventually it will come back to you.

Trying to overthrow the Senate is evidently the line you can't cross.
Rails 6.1 adds support for role switching and sharding in database
very very few need so many regions to choose from
People have done it with Linux; exposing the rest of Android is not out of the question. (The main issue here will be performance, since there isn’t much support for anything but interpretation.)
If Twitter and [expletive deleted] go down together, then maybe some good comes of this.
Yep. If any sort of MITM attack was their motivation for this, they didn't really think it through.
That argument doesn't hold water.

"Hang Mike Pence", as has been noted many times, was trending because people were discussing the videos showing Trump rioters chanting that.

People were not banned for using that phrase for the same reason you and I are not going to be banned/flagged for using it here: we aren't calling for violence and murder.

edit: previously called this a bad-faith argument, but that's not fair.
I really wish political people would just disappear at this point. Liberal and Conservative extremists have ruined every online space I have ever been a part of. Whether it's someone who can't help themselves from calling everyone a white nationalist/sexist/misogynist/racist or whether it's people like this trying to use brigading, manipulation, and hate to get their way.

I already can't watch the news because it's just lined with narratives instead of truth and this war of escalations is far out of hand. In my hometown in San Diego, these people are fighting each other with knives, bear mace, skateboards, bikes, and hateful rhetoric in the same places that people used to come to surf. You now have people that have taken over government buildings and people across the spectrum that make regular attempts at excusing it.

I am so tired of it. I am so tired of all of you. I am sure dang and company have tools to find these people.
Yes, you can even build a glider! https://news.mit.edu/2018/first-ionic-wind-plane-no-moving-p...
I think this attempt by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (but unrelated to Wikipedia itself) comes close [1].

Honestly, if it manages to approximately implement the community approach that works under Wikimedia itself, it may well become the most non-toxic social network, as they self-advertise it.

https://wt.social/ [1]
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Bitcoin was in alpha when Satoshi released it and then left 2 years later. If he/she stayed Bitcoin would be something like PayPal is today. Without founder/s projects aren't the same just like when Jobs left Apple, Apple almost disappeared under new leadership.
While I agree with the conclusion. People tend to overestimate the fraction of people incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses.

It is only ~15%

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html
Since when do people only vote for people they completely agree with and not the "better of two evils"? If the choices are the party that actively wants to censor you and the party that doesn't want to pass legislation to protect you from censorship, the choice is obvious.
TL;DR: SQL is still a DE's best and most ubiquitous tool/language in the space--hands down.

I've led DE teams for the last decade. I have lived through shifts in toolsets, languages, etc. Regardless of platform, languages, model types, etc, etc, etc, etc, the one constant has been SQL with some sort of of scripting around it.

Right now, it seems Python is the big wrapper language, whether it's via dag or some other means but that's just the preferred method TODAY. Considering SQL has been around for decades and has outlasted just about every other language and system, many of which have opted for a SQL-like interface on top of their system, I would highly recommend DEs be very strong there.
> If that data were stored somewhere I had access to I could have imported it in to Spotify.

At the moment we've been pushing services in the wrong direction to create their own schemas. However, we may win back control with standards on this one.

But yes, the idea is that you are able to remove the control they have over the data you've produced. It's such a terrible arguement to claim they own the data. (Also, why do they need to control that other than to try to prevent you from leaving)
HTTPS + RSS + Webring/etc. Existing, well-defined protocols that are nimble and able to meet changing needs.

I'm not sure why everyone wants to over-complicate this.

If you want to make it easy enough to use for any mom and grandma, and you want any hope of gaining traction then you're going to need capital, which is going to necessitate a business.

And perhaps it should require some effort, some learning, and some know-how before one can jump on their Internet soapbox. The signal to noise ratio is pretty low.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn8CLhEU4jA

By the way, if you like this then you might also like this video about acoustic levitation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABjRnSYw-4k
This being HN I expected more commentary around how a company can/should build technology to survive such incidents, and not go down just because one of your providers either blocked you or themselves went down.
For what it's worth, I don't think that it is ok. I'm just acknowledging the conflict of feeling bad for innocents caught up in this and being glad that some real bad actors might be exposed.
They switch away when he begins spouting unmitigated lies, which is a responsible form of journalism.
I wonder how he would feel about Sect 230 getting rolled back. Parler would be down and out (that said it's down and out right now).

For clarity I don't support changing 230.
I 'signed up' on the desktop version, but you can't the 'verify/badge' stuff is only available via the mobile app, AFAICT.
All hosts have the power to shutdown anything they want, this isn't unique to amazon.
On my Moto E4 (Android 7.1.1) the default Android camera app also reads QR codes. But nothing in the app. nor app. help actually tells anyone that it will do this. The only way one discovers it is by pointing the camera at a QR code to see what happens, and realizing that the app just decoded the QR code it was viewing.
A: No he does not. The White House can talk as much as it likes, but without the press to actually disseminate the words no one will hear them.

If Newspapers, TV, and YouTube (etc) all refused to carry the words what other avenue does the President have? An emergency alert to mobile phones?

And B: That doesn't answer the question posed. The question is not about the President, it's about a political dissident in general.
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Time for all these SaaS companies to cut ties with Facebook.
I have some family members who are similar.

In the past, I would be able to help talk people through their conspiracy theories to come to a logical conclusion that what they were hearing was too big, too harmful, or otherwise incapable of accomplishing anything to actually be true.

That approach is becoming harder the bigger this becomes.
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I don't think it's true, but..

> Do you really think the best way for a government agency to access government IDs is to secretly run a Twitter clone?

The best way to get a bunch of white supremacists and insurrectionists to robustly, undeniably identify themselves might be to ask them to upload their ID. :P
Best you can do is lead by example and say that you are getting the vaccine or already got it if you did.
First they came for the Nazis, and I said "acutally this is great for the Jews, socialists, trade unionists etc" and we don't have to do the rest of the poem.
Not just that but the President still has a presence on Twitter both through @POTUS and @WhiteHouse.
This is an excellent point. Every ToS has clauses in it which can easily be interpreted against you.
> A private company cannot be authoritarian.

Almost all private companies are authoritarian. Examples of non-authoritarian companies might include co-ops.
NYT and FOX are not big tech. They are big news.
From what I've read, the redriver does break USB 3 connectivity [1], but it might also be the marker chip not explicitly indicating USB3 support.

And I think the maximum length for passive Thunderbolt 3 40 Gbit/s cables is indeed 50cm [2]! 50-200cm would be 20 Gbit/s only; anything above always requires active cables.

[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/17/08/15/psa-thunderbolt-3...

[2] https://blog.startech.com/post/thunderbolt-3-the-basics/
Yeah but (almost?) nobody is in federal prison on drug possession charges, especially after the latest reform bill. There are a lot in prison on trafficking and sales, but not possession ("minor", per the headline).

The vast majority of drug charges are in state prison systems, where plea bargains are absolutely a thing.
> But when he goes to another network (Parler) it's shut down with 24hrs notice by Amazon. To anyone who's the least bit of a political dissident, alarm bells should be screaming in your ears. If a handful of tech execs can (and will) do this to the US president, what chance would you stand against them, or anyone, if they want to silence you?

Your question is weirdly lacking in context. There was an attack on Congress, whose nastiest bits were openly planned on Parler. It's not like these companies just suddenly decided to cut ties because they didn't like Trump's views. They've actually been extremely tolerant of him, giving him policy exceptions left and right (e.g. if he wasn't the president, he'd probably have been banned from Twitter years ago).

> Would it be possible to host your political views on any commercial hosting vendor in this case? Is running a server at home enough, assuming you can avoid DOS somehow? Would you have to start your own ISP, and if so, could your ISP be kicked off the backbone?

> I'm interested in this as a technical (not political) question: is there any way to speak online if big tech decides they don't want you to?

Obviously, yes. Donald Trump has a website (https://www.donaldjtrump.com/), and it's still up. He can speak online there.
Great article.

> Do you have it in you to ignore 800 epidemiologists, and is it actually good idea?

Yes, I do, because I was tracking the wave of non-stop bullshit coming from scientists closely throughout all of 2020, and got completely fed up. But I'm not the norm (yet), and no, it's not actually a good solution.

We're in the beginning of the story of the boy who cried wolf. Eventually the whole town ended up like me: fully willing to ignore and oppose the mainstream information channels. When a real wolf came, the boy told the truth once out of 1,000 times, and the townspeople all ignored him and got their sheep eaten up. We need to find a way to crowd-source our trust mechanism if "trust the experts" starts to fail.

My suggestion is that any "expert" who volunteers an opinion that later gets falsified should be canceled permanently from the public sphere, with no forgiveness. They can go on publishing in scientific journals and selling books, but their opinion should not be accepted by the general public anymore.

The other solution is to keep ignoring the boy and start watching your own sheep.
Typo:

remaining nodes*
You may read his statements so, but his followers treated them as marching orders.

https://twitter.com/LiteraryMouse/status/1347873498925064194
Indeed. When evaluating reddit threads and content, its important to distinguish between highly upvoted and visible content, and content that was downvoted or deleted to oblivion. A -1000 call for violence in one subreddit is not equivalent to a +1000 call for violence in another.
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Making Sense of a World in Transition
This essay points out a pervasive problem that doesn't get much attention (aside from fear-mongering)

Because it's a topic so easily prone to hyperbole, it helps if we can reduce it down to a few premises.

- Science is science, but the practice of science is a social system. People get tenures, jobs, promoted, invitation to speak, etc. by how well they do in the judgment of their peers

- Political systems exist for political reasons, ie, if you don't have a reproducible, falsifiable test in a feedback loop somewhere, your career and goals are all about image. There's no alternative, either for you or your field of study (That doesn't mean other sciences aren't important or aren't really science.)

- If somebody appears on TV or in the media playing the role of an expert, it is, by definition, because they wanted to appear on TV or in the media. The goals of being popular and asked about important questions and the goals of whatever your field are ... two different things. The reporter doesn't care who figured out X. They care who can bring excitement and emotion to talking about X.

- All this leads directly to the problem of the average science news consumer: any communication you receive about science or research is the result of a lot of conflicting interests. "Being good science" is way down the list, sadly. I imagine the percentage of average readers who understand p-hacking is below 5%

- None of this is a secret. The average news consumer knows it, even if they're not able to articulate it

- Add in things like the reproducibility crisis, and we've got a huge problem as a species. We've got one flashlight to light our way in the darkness and it turns out there's a loose connection in there somewhere
This is a sad day for free speech.
And I'm assuming they mean incarcerated (jail+prison) and not just 'jail'. Most of the people in jail are awaiting trial, people in prison have been convicted.
On Apple devices, blown fuses actually lock the hardware :/
Harder to blame "big tech" in that case!

I guarantee you that if he called into Fox, his comments would be carried by every media outlet and discussed exhaustively on Twitter.
No, fascists are by definition right wing.
I have no horse in this race. Reading the posted article I have a hard time understanding why you posted this comment. The article has reasoned arguments related to software development. Your comment is pure emotion which seems to be your main claim against the article.
Apparently Parler collects phone numbers and scans of government-issued ID. I suspect most people in a Western country would find it difficult to "burn" their legal name and birthdate.
It was on purpose.

Like I'm saying powerful people want to convince America we are being attacked. The best way to do that is to make it look like a real threat. They basically left the front door open, where BLM protesters got tear gas immediately. Do you disagree that the response to the two groups of protesters was a little uneven?

The only difference in our opinions is that I think the response was on purpose. Huck Finn Braveheart is not a criminal mastermind. The number of protesters were miniscule compared to the BLM protesters. If the secret service and police actually wanted to stop them it would have been very easy.
The problem with this is that in the case of Google/FB/etc the database to be copied is so large as to make this task functionally impossible. Even if you happened to have a half a petabyte of storage available somewhere you would lack the bandwidth to exfiltrate. The problem with Parler is that it was living on a shared cloud so it was easy for someone to spin up copies and use intra-DC copy mechanisms (or even simple volume mirroring) and the data was also small enough to be within reach for anyone who was curious -- it would cost you less than $5K to copy and then export the entire Parler corpus in less than an afternoon.
Here's an idea I've been playing with: you can buy your own AS and small IP block for a few thousand dollars. There are many data centers that will give you BGP access to then announce that IP range and route it to your servers. The result will be that whois tools will not actually report which data center you're in, but will report "Uncensorable Inc" or whatever you choose to call yourself. No one will know which company to tweet at to try to have you deplatformed.

I'll be trying to do this to see if it works, if I succeed I'll post a story or two here with a demo and how-to instructions.
> but it turns out they do have extensive moderation [1] that they use to ensure ideological conformity

Am I missing something? What are you referring to exactly? The mod tools screenshot doesn't support that assertion.
> not too different from the telephone or email

Facebook is a broadcast medium, so very different than the telephone. Email is somewhere in between—it works fine 1-to-many, but not so well many-to-many.

> don't you think these perpetrators will find an equally effective technology to spread their propaganda?

Maybe they will, but that's hardly a reason to ignore these atrocities. Maybe they won't. Maybe future technologies will be more careful about encouraging people to join extreme groups because it increases engagement.

> it seems like the media want to convince me to hate Facebook

Nobody's asking you to hate Facebook, but you should be aware of the power they posses, and how irresponsible they are being with that power. You don't need to bring your personal feelings into this at all.
Domestic Terrorism is still Terrorism. Should be dealt with as such
Twitter had a policy against misgendering and had locked her out of her account several times before banning her. If this is something Meghan thinks is worth getting banned over, that's on her. Most people just don't care what pronoun somebody wants to be called, so the non-asshole thing to do is to just use their preferred pronoun.
probably would have worked on a real hv supply. maybe time to reprise the experiment? :)
Even LineageOS can only help so far. I've got a Galaxy S7 Edge, bought it dec. 2016. It's not even supported by Lineage OS any more.
Badge data isn't an ideal people counting solution
What you describe make my blood boil. I cant imaging what is the purpose of punishing people to the end of their days for old crimes however petty they were. Fucking prison planet.
It's interesting to me that the demand for Parler was almost exclusively the result of policies enacted by other social media platforms. Perhaps there was merit to the notion that letting groups operate in a contained area of larger platforms would have been favorable to outright bans. This would allow the larger platforms to monitor engagement, control spread, and quietly respond as they desired, no one the wiser. Instead they made very public proclamations of content restrictions and bans, which escalated some casual participants to more engaged participants. These participants then gathered on a new platform that promised the ability to say anything, so they started saying anything. But then some people started to believe anything. And then the beliefs turned into action, and then it became a real problem. But the outcome is in no way surprising. What is surprising is that the response now is the same response that started it all, more public bans and content restrictions. It's trivial to start a social media app (especially when security is not the priority), so in a few months another app will pop up, and it too will get out of hand, but what then? It seems like policymakers and thought leaders aren't thinking long term and are doing nothing to look at underlying issues.
A policy prescription requires weighing of values, which a scientist should avoid at all costs. It's quite literally the point of science, to understand how the world works without injecting your personal biases about how the world should work.
I think in there case of something like Acid the weight can be an incorrect measure of substance.

I heard it was popular to use the old books of stamps. So five doses on a stamp book is a silly about of weight. Then over a certain weight it is considered distribution and boom the sentence is jumped. Thanks to the war on drugs I’m not sure how much can even be reasoned by a judge.

Now, keep in mind, I’m not necessarily on the side of no more crimes. I do see the cracks in how the offenses wer e codified.

Things like marijuana outside distribution should probably be ignored. I was horrified watching someone on a cop show get arrested for a roach they found nearby on the ground. This was also a person who was strolling through a walkway in the forest between residences.
Exactly. Only one of these paths does not have a hidden/probabilistic cost. Hard to say what's the market rate for exposing yourself to criminal prosecution, it's not like there's a hedging market for such things.

Though if as a corp you cover the black market rate fully then there's really no reason for a researcher to ever sell on the black market.
Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
I was going to mention tor, but it too isn't a very scalable service and can be (almost) just as easily taken down by disgruntled hosts or government sanctions.
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The article doesn't say they have exhausted all languages, just that it is their first choice. Not their only choice but first choice.
Expert opinion isn't really worth anything until it's been stress tested by other experts. I worked with experts in the context of patent and trade secret litigation. I pick people at the top of their field from prestigious universities with impeccable credentials.

If you ask them off the cuff questions they often are wrong. But if they investigate and think about it, they'll correct themselves.

Experts are also just as susceptible to bias, motivated reasoning, groupthink, etc. as anyone else.

This is why academic papers are supposed to be a back and forth discussion. "TRUST THE EXPERTS" has a plural for reason, and should be understood to mean trust the experts after they've done a thoughtful analysis with the best available evidence and have considered dissenting expert views.