skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have never said that speech should be fully free. I do have criteria that would be used to censor speech. However, neither the sixth riots or the summer riots had many actors whose speech I believe ought to have been banned.

For example, while I believe the democratic party spurred on or sat back in silence while BLM and Antifa rioted, most democratic politicians did not do anything that deserves censorship. Even Kamala Harris's financial support of those who looted and destroyed police stations in Minneapolis should not be censored -- the bail she asked for was a completely legal thing to provide.

As for the sixth, Trump's posts were entirely peaceful. He consistently asked for a peaceful demonstration. There are those claiming that using phrasing like 'fight' or 'take your country back', etc, incite violence. I do not believe that for one minute. Banning the opposition from saying they should 'fight' the incumbents or 'take the country back' from them seems incredibly dangerous. Even such colorful language as asking for politicians heads on a platter should not be banned (I recall several incidences of twitter accounts depicting Trump's beheading).

Politics in general leads to strong emotions. People have strong emotions over politicians. English has lots of colorful language for people we don't like. I believe the standards for 'violence' against politicians ought to be much lower than for calling for violence against people, especially non-governmental agents. For example, I do believe some of the BLM incitement of anger that instructed people to burn or loot local businesses (especially when that anger and mob then led to deaths), ought to have been soundly condemned, and I believe twitter should have flagged it and taken some measures to punish the account (although I still think outright censorship for one post would be overkill).

This is because these posts direct anger indiscriminately at people of a certain class, not one specific person who may actually have power. I find those kinds of posts highly problematic, and those would be the first I would censor, but again, I think we have seen only a handful of those over the past year. Certainly, I don't think any major politician has reached that bar.

So no, I do not believe in no censorship ever, I just have very open standards as to what speech to allow that would mainly have me allowing the vast majority of speech. I am not going to tighten my standards simply because left-wingers find them distasteful or want to accuse me of being a free speech zealot. I've stood on these same principles since when I was a democrat, and I'll stand on them now.
You assume the steady stream of disinformation is only coming from facebook, and not the news corporations.

The reality is that CNN, MSNBC, Huffington post, New York Times, FOX, etc. all are shoving fluffed up pieces with an extreme bias. Every media outlet is doing this.

> Everyone keeps making these same points in every thread, and no minds are changed.

I agree with this. This is why we have always defaulted to "free speech" in America, while saying calls for violence are illegal. Currently, however, only one side's ideas are being banned; even if they don't call for violence, only if they "make people angry".

With and estimated ~200 protestors entering the building, we've effectively silenced tens of millions in response.
These people can stay crazy longer than the country can last.

For instance, if some people reevaluate their beliefs and come to a more generally accepted understanding of truth in the near future, the capital will still have been rioted.
I don't know, I've been intrigued by plain text double-entry bookkeeping for a while, it looks like fun, but on the second thought I just don't see any real benefit for a regular person (probably, most IT specialists don't qualify). You get your salary, you set aside 20-75% to pay the bills, some amount you know from experience you need for groceries and other recurring expenses (like public transport and household goods) and if you happen to have anything left it goes to savings. If you're privileged, you'll also have some petty cash left for occasional lunch/night out. When you need to spend some significant unplanned sum you take it out of savings, if you have any. If not, you eat less or go into debt.

What's there to track, how much you've spent on potatoes and underwear this month versus the previous?

That was the scenario for a disciplined citizen. Most just pay the bills (not necessary all of them) and then just spend what's left on their debit card until there's nothing left. It usually happens before the next salary, of course. No accounting software would help there.

UPD: I'm not sure it was the right place to spill my negativity, I fully understand the benefits of being organized with your finances.
"That part of the business" is still a huge portfolio of product offerings in-and-around the scientific publishing space. If you cut one head of the hydra, another will just grow back in its place.

The company came to be so dominant because their strategy of vertical integration is effective and repeatable. Identify a market of valuable information; build tools to collect & collate that information; build tools for searching through the information; build tools for adding annotations or otherwise improving the value of the information; build tools to enable people to provide information directly through the platform.

They've basically repeated this pattern for science, medicine, legal, and insurance industries. So much so that it's really impossible to pry them out of a space because they get so tightly integrated that they actually become indistinguishable from the market.

I'm not favoring reed elsevier here, just pointing out that their dominance is very well established and isn't going to be easy to bring them down.
Some varieties of bananas are quite hardy. The most hardy is the musa basjoo. That can overwinter in zone 6b (-5F).
This guy has a banana jungle, in Ohio.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9mIc3IymJ0
> The transition from a situation in which public officials can speak to the public directly to one in which they can only do so at the whim of corporate titans is not a safe precedent.

Public officials have not lost any ability they ever had to speak directly to the public. They have at the same time always had an additional ability to do so mitigated by the need to get other private parties (including, but not limited to, “corporate titans”) to relay their speech, whether it was newspapers which existed before the founding and expanded over time, broadcast media starting in the early 20th century, or online media starting in the late 20th century.

And it's not a new phenomenon that some subset of current incumbent politicians might lose some degree of the favor they have had with one of those mechanisms that relies on the exercise of First Amendment rights by some intermediary.
Early versions of reddit's wiki were more or less reskinned infogami.

As to the co-founder question, Aaron was definitely a co-founder of the merged reddit/infogami company, but he didn't contribute much after that, leading to his departure. I think that, rather than any controversy over his arrest is why Steve and Alexis didn't really consider him a co-founder.
> NV has put a great deal of recent work into getting their system to execute regular multi-threaded code with the same sort of speedup as they have had with SIMD workloads.

I think you're talking about "Independent Thread Scheduling", which has been deployed since Volta.

https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/volta-tuning-guide/index.html#s...

https://images.nvidia.com/content/volta-architecture/pdf/vol...

You're close... but wrong in a few key areas.

What NVidia has done is make it POSSIBLE to run multithreaded code without deadlocks. There's still the thread-divergence performance problem.

That is to say: you can now do more classical lock/unlock paradigms on NVidia hardware, but the code is serialized and becomes sequential. One 32-wide SIMD unit will execute only 1x thread at a time in that case. (That is: 1/32 utilization. The SM is designed to handle 32 SIMD threads but is only executing one of them at a time)

So you still have the thread-divergence performance problem. On older GPUs, such divergence would have been a DEADLOCK instead. So you've gone from 0% performance utilization to 3% utilization, which means your code actually will finish.

But it doesn't mean that your code actually has any degree of worthwhile performance. Indeed: CPUs have proven that time-and-time again, per-thread branch-prediction and prefetching is best for that kind of code.

If you have a great deal of divergent if/else statements in your code, you'll want to run on CPUs. NVidia GPUs can now handle those situations better (ie: without deadlocking if those if/else statements contain thread-synchronization statements), but they aren't actually high-performance in those use cases.
Yup, the Cavendish is what you find in non-banana-growing countries. Almost the only species of banana on the planet to get exported to other countries, as it is uniquely able to with stand the long journey. And, like most hardy, exportable fruit, it has one of the blandest flavors.

It's also very susceptible to a fungal blight, the Panama disease, which may eventually end up wiping out the entire variety, and make exported bananas a rarity.
An Early Look at the Parler Online Social Network
Difference being that Facebook moderates content. This was the Apple complaint against Parler. Parler has publicly touted itself as the 4chan/8chan of social media apps. It is more that the culture of Parler is being rejected by the App Store gate keepers and not so much the vehicle enabling it.
Mozilla VPN Now Available for Ubuntu Linux and Mac
I find the phrase “incite violence” to be a deceptive term to use.
A threat of violence is a very defined term. Both legally and in common understanding.
“Incites violence” is vague and takes the responsibility away from the one conducting violence, and places it on somebody else who may or may not have been promoting violence. It’s usage is not defined legally or in common usage.
“Barney is the worst dinosaur” could be “inciting violence” if somebody attacked the purple children’s mascot.

Should we have to mute ourselves because crazy people might use our words as justification for their madness?
Should others censor my opinions because in their opinion, a third party might use my words for justification for their madness?
> the political left (who were previously notorious for promoting free-speech)

Free speech is a libertarian ideal. The libertarian right and libertarian left both support free speech.

What you're seeing is the rise of the authoritarian left.
I ate a banana off a tree I happened upon while hiking in a small jungle in Tobago (north of Venezuela). It was awful, and a reminder how cultivation is such a fascinating science. (Yes, it definitely wasn't ripe, but I just wanted to try it because I'd never seen it before!)
Critical thinking? The vast majority of useful information in the world is based on trust and authority, not on critical verification and people examining the evidence directly.

Do you have any idea just how much work it is to verify that just the facts cited actually match up? That doesn't include verifying if the facts are accurate in and in itself.

I did a surface level verification to a virology professor, and I found a few details wrong, and some which I couldn't figure out which fact was likely correct. It took me forever to do, and that was just one part of a very long lecture series.

How about the fact that whenever someone offer me a cure for covid-19 in term of injecting bleach, I basically dismissed it out of hand. Was it because I think long and hard about injecting bleach into my body is a good idea? No. There was certainly no critical thinking happening. It's a reflexive rejection.

instead of being the police of literally all the information on your giant social media platform?

These platforms are not in any way unbiased free for all discussion forums. They are already making editorial choices by choosing to promote viral posts to drive up engagement metric and pushing down any less inflammatory posts.

At the very least they can do is slow down any angry promoting posts.
This is not true. The vast, vast, vast majority of works from the classical world we have were saved by byzantine and western European monks.

I am thankful we the works saved by Muslims, but there has been a gross over reaction where the true source of most of our knowledge of the classical world has been ignored so people can score woke points for praising non western cultures and erasing the contributions of the west and christendom.
Which has its foundations in the First Amendment...

Before then, "free speech" as a concept did not exist. (The closest was the freedom of religious practice, which is not the same thing.)
Part of the problem is that people feel things are true and you can't debate or logicise that away. You can't argue against a feeling because it's deeply personal and you can't invalidate feelings. The most you can offer is another perspective and hope they're willing to consider it. Short of having them convince themselves, you can't really change people's minds when they feel something is true.
It interferes with their ability to spread their beliefs (as well as plan violence).
Wikipedia: Federal Prison Industries, Inc
Parler isn't the first app to get cut from app/play store, and it's not the first online service to be given the cold shoulder by its infrastructure providers.

If you rely on a provider, don't motivate the provider to end its relationship with you. The best mitigation here is, first, don't cater to fascists who want to tear apart the fabric of American society.

Second, if you're going to piss people off, either set up a contract that doesn't give your infrastructure provider the freedom to end its relationship with you, or do without the benefits of cloud. AWS isn't a utility, and its services are largely replaceable -- buy some computers and set up your own servers.
Wine is weakly fungible. Specific wines, not so much, but I believe that the category of French wines can be effectively cross supplied by domestic American. Demand for wine should, in theory, shift there.
> when the right asks, “how do we know that racism and not crime rates belies police shooting disparities?”

This question isn't asked in good faith.

Besides, it's actually irrelevant; those deaths are statistics. What was demanded was prosecutions of specific police for specific shootings of specific, named people such as Breonna Taylor.

It's up to the white community to decide if police shootings of white people are too frequent, not frequent enough, or whatever. That is irrelevant to the BLM question.
Ask HN: How to get away from a job that crushes your soul slowly?
Hello HN,

I would like to ask your advice here.
I graduated 3 years ago with a degree in computer engineering, with a focus on software. I then spent a year jobless, due bad health and social skills. I was 2 months ago diagnosed (after an assessment) with autism spectrum disorderd and bipolar disorder type 2. Since 2 years I have a job at an electronics assemblage company. However there are some problems at work. There are just 5 people who do some design/programming.

In September, I was transferred from the design department to the production 'test' department due bad performance at my job. Projects being over budget, while I wasn't aware of what the budget or expected timespan was. A lot of things to went wrong. At the same time, I did a lot of programming work during my free time for the company. During April 2020, I was officially on unemployment benefits due to Corona, but I did work 10 full days anyway. I feel like a scapegoat at my company, because I'm the programmer at an electronics production firm and they are the electronics people. My boss didn't like that I did software must of the time, but that's what my team asked from me.

Now I have to do manual, repetitive work like testing: taking a PCB, check if it works and put a label on it. That has been my life last months. I haven't seen a schematic or oscilloscope closely the last months, while they said that I will 'learn electronics'. I feel miserable and depressed at work. The only thing that kept me reasonably sane was a 'hidden ear piece'.
I use this to listen to podcasts about cryptography, programming, bioinformatics, finance, electronics, just anything that interests me.

My question is: how I could pivot myself away from this job into some other job/career? I started contributing to a Qt open source project during my weekends. The idea of going freelance seems alluring, but it also something new.
One thing I find hard is that I feel numb most of the time.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov recently confirmed the fact on his personal Telegram channel (@Durov). "In the first week of January, Telegram surpassed 500 million monthly active users. After that it kept growing: 25 million new users joined Telegram in the last 72 hours alone," shared Durov.
Why should the state have power to police speech during elections? (FB shouldn't either)
> Indeed. It's impossible to stop the spread of disinformation completely, no matter what we do. Instead, what we need, is better education on how to parse and digest information we receive from others.

True, but you're being too black and white. While it may not be possible to stop disinformation completely, it is possible to reduce it significantly. What you're advocating for is akin to admitting that lead will never be completely eliminated from drinking water, so instead of doing anything to reduce it from toxic levels, we should (unrealistically) work on making people who are immune to lead poisoning.

Your solution is a chimera. It is not possible (or at least wildly impractical given current constraints) to teach most people to be so knowledgeable and wise that they can find the truth in a haystack of seductive lies. And even if that wasn't true, the people who've bought into the lies would label your education program as biased and fight it.
Seconded. Establishing what is disinformation is hard; establishing truth is even harder. Restricting speech is fraught with trouble, but there is much precedent in the USA for compelling speech: see drug warnings and nutrition facts.

Censoring and banning should be reserved for actual hazards such as provoking violence. But I think the automatic tagging of social media with "Here is another perspective", while being seen by some as chilling, is the best way to go.
Yeah, it's all getting more expensive. Still waaaay cheaper than rent in Perth, though ;)

My awesome German GF just got us a new 3-room apartment at 900/month in Wedding. I was paying roughly that for a 1-room shitty flat in Perth a few years ago during the "rental boom".
I think we have different reads of the root comment of this thread. Yoav[1] was talking about the contract between AWS and Parler as corporate entities. I'm not sure how you made the leap from organizational relationships to individuals using services implemented on AWS.

That's why I asked about members of Parler still being able to "use" AWS through other AWS-hosted services. I don't get what you're driving at.

> AWS isn't responsible for them.

Again, I'm not sure I understand what point this is responding to. No one is claiming AWS is responsible for the capital hill folks. They are claiming that Parler bears some responsibility and did so in such a way that violated AWS' policies. So AWS banned them.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25748097
Would Voltaire's famous "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" apply here?

Perhaps we need a better, faster judicial mechanism for taking down "major content". I'm not saying the government is a great solution for this problem, but IMHO it beats the status quo until we can find a better system.
As much as some of the Parler content was definitely awful, I've seen much worse on dialup BBS's and during the Great Cognitive Corruption of Usenet that started in the 80's and greatly accelerated onwards from there.

I'm more troubled by the total cessation of infrastructure as the mitigation of choice, rather than a temporary pause of services. During the pause, work with law enforcement to identify those specific posts that satisfy the Brandenberg "imminent" criteria, mark those as redacted, then return to service. Leaving open possible further work with law enforcement to share a feed and tie in redaction by future judicial decisions. I'm hoping I missed where it says that Parler was offered this choice and turned it down.

I'm even more troubled by the continued "let them eat cake" dismissive ennui of the chattering classes to the natural-world plights of the most radicalized members of the Trump supporters (and for that matter, to BLM supporters' plights treatment by other chattering classes), as they're pretty much at the "nothing left to lose" stage. Having been not simply ignored since the 70's onwards, but jeered at, derided, and mocked, instead of rehabilitating their life situations, has driven them into the arms of malign ideologies that openly lie to them fealty will improve their lot in life, when no other ideology will have them.

Just like in my enterprise work with my clients, when I hear extreme dissatisfaction, that's an opportunity for me to listen, empathize, then work together iteratively to solve problems. Instead, the US treats such expressions as opportunities to suppress. That only guarantees the pressure builds up elsewhere you cannot predict (in enterprise work, it often manifests as political chits being called in, and budget found where none was found before to completely pivot away and build the users' own solution, however imperfect it may be).

The US treats many of its have-nots (all along the political spectrum and not just along one vector) like it treats its prisoners. Brutalize with platitude-laden inaction instead of rehabilitate. It's no wonder the nation manufactures a dictatorship-loving consent.
Aside: Some people pay tons of money for software due to addictive game design, social and UX patterns.

But I agree. Building good UX is hard, iterative work and requires a connection of right and left brain thinking via communication or generalists.

Graphic, UI, UX and game designers are typically not as engaged with open source as programmers and engineers. Is this a cultural issue or is it inherent? Ultimately any given UI is a concretion, but I've noticed a strong trend to abstraction in these fields. Design Systems/Language, Design Thinking and so on. I mean the term "UX" is in of itself an abstraction. And the digital tools that designers use today are much more powerful and varied than just a decade ago.

Maybe it is a matter of time until there is more engagement in open source from the design world.
Think it has something to do with the ubiquitous breakdown of mental health, leading to cultural war and inevitable cultural Balkanization, at a minimum?
Only seems to have a package for Ubuntu so far: https://launchpad.net/~mozillacorp/+archive/ubuntu/mozillavp...
> but because the government refused to do so.

This is just narrative. Immediately after the Capitol riots people were trying to create narratives that the FBI and Capitol Hill police intentionally didn't do their job. That turned out not to be true, as the piece by Brian Stelter showed. This reasoning seems to be a further manipulated form of that. I would not expect the American government to be making public statements. Generally it's the president that addresses the public and obviously in this case he didn't.