skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My only hope is that the rest of the Western world takes note from observing the dissolution and atomization of US society at the hands of identity politics and makes a firm choice to not let their own societies traverse the same path.

I, sadly, do not see how America comes out of this together, embracing a "live and let live" type attitude, in a world where identity politics does not continue to dominate the narrative, when a large bulk of the mainstream has stoked, embraced and celebrated a loosely constructed contextually and historically ignorant hierarchy and narrative of the "oppressed" and of the "oppressors". Where one half of the populace believes the nation itself to be fundamentally good , worthwhile or indeed "the best", and the other believes it to be rotten to the core not just now but since its very beginning. Where one half believes that the 2020 election was genuinely stolen from them by socialists and communists, and the other genuinely believes they've just defeated something in line with Adolf Hitler, who himself stole the 2016 election thanks to Russians with a couple million of FB ad spend.

I hope to be wrong.
Sorry mate, these are assertions - I too have held them.

I simply have tested them, at length.

Which is why I encourage you to go ahead and join the fight, go volunteer earnestly as a mod.

If you survive burnout, you will see the contours of the battlefield - our human neurological weaknesses, the resources strung out on either side, the fragility of the structures we need as a society.

I repeat - all of these are simply assertions, and as a forum of techies, we should be testing these ideas - people here created tech which allows us to do this like no generation before us.

In the spirit of science - go for it.

I’ve spent years studying this, even wrote a dissertation on the subject space. I’ve had these discussions many times, I’ve seen what happens when people decide I am wrong and set out to prove it.

I have always wished people who take that task on, the very best. If you reach a different conclusion, I will be the happiest person in the world.
We've found the same thing with other software we make. The free users and those charitable organizations and schools we give free licenses to, are the least "nice" in their technical support queries. Odd that.
Oh man, I totally forget how much overlap there is between communist Russia and cancel culture.

/s just in case
The problem with the directive "Please be nice" is that it's unclear what behaviour it prescribes.

"Nice" is self-assessed. Almost everybody thinks they are being nice, and fair. Even despots think that when they self assess.

It's more constructive to have guidelines that tell people specifically what to do and not do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> But once the ice is gone, its a hot summer day everywhere.

Well that’s an extra depressing way to put it to me for some reason.
This just sounds like being a polite human in public spaces? Common advice was always to avoid talking about politics and religion or anything else controversial in places you need to get along.
Yes, I suppose what that is referring to is unclear to me. It does seem to change context:

> "Davidson's criticizing the air force for concealment of information on flying saucers. Incidentally, Davidson is no fool and it appears that ATIC is treating him as one if they think he can be satisfied with a SOP such as Captain's.."

Did Davidson publish context criticizing the circular wing research and development programs? [0] Or was his criticism directly related to this space message?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar#Desig...
That's not really the point. It's a question of whether the expectation is reasonable. If Twitter and Facebook can't do it then it's strong evidence that it's not.
I viewed Parler before it went under. Not true. Plenty of people making threats.
Unf. Because it is no problem for me!

Mischnix needz teletubbytoyz.
Simple. Apple users spend more [1]. Not to say you can’t make money on Windows, Linux or Android, obviously there are thousands of successful software businesses on those platforms. It’s just that iOS and Mac users really don’t mind spending.

Apple users also seem to appreciate (and pay for) boutique indie apps. As a Mac user, I paid $25 for Byword just because it was a really nice Markdown editor. That appetite for quality apps gives indies a great market opportunity.

Edit: oh yeah, and a lot of devs use macOS so why wouldn’t they want great apps on the platform they use?

[1]: https://www.appannie.com/en/insights/market-data/mobile-hit-...
I'm just saying that if a small subset of states (NY/CA/TX/FL,etc) essentially could pick the President as an example, you run the risk of alienating a lot of states, including some that are really important, but have small populations.

And it could get to the point where they wish to exit the union. Let's say you lose the farmland and Alaska and some other important, but low population states.

Is that worth it so everyone could say that the most votes will always win?

We already have a system where candidates can just ignore states. They really can't ignore regions though with the electoral college. They have to have some cross regional appeal to win. That's a good thing.

Straight popular votes is too risky for little gain.

I care more about the states and their rights, the preservation of the union, the country's assets, and other things than ensuring that every vote is counted 1:1 in practice. For many, yes, their vote will not matter depending on who they vote for and where they live. But the founders anticipated more than most realize.

It's like when you have an election with 10 candidates. Nobody gets a majority, but some people are like - whoever gets the most votes should win!

That's not likely to be the best result.

I'm a big fan of keeping it simple. But I don't believe a straight popular vote would be a better system with our history, today's divisiveness and the goals of preserving the union.
Voting by land area vs voting by population is one of the oldest debates ever. There's pros and cons to either side, but the general idea is that in a representative democracy you want the different groups to have their interests represented (i.e. if you have 30% of the vote, you should have 30% of the "power"). Pure population might be more likely to lead to policy for population centeres at the expense of rural centers, since you just need 51% of the vote to do what you want, as the majority takes all the power. E.g. if 75% of population is urban and 25% rural, and assuming that they are unified voting blocs (big if), rural effectively has 0% of the power, as 25% of the vote is going to win a majority vote 0% of the time. Ideally they would win 25% of the votes (or have 25% of the "power" somehow), but failing that, having half the power seems more fair than having none of it.

I remember i heard once the idea that if the percent of the representitives was porportional to the sqrt of the population, that that tracks the amount of effective power much more closely to the population distribution than linearly assigning representitives, but i dont know how true that is.
I think this is merely an adjustment to how people use social media.

Regular people expressing their opinion on public media is only a 10-year old phenomenon. But people have been self-censoring in real life forever.

There are things you say at work and things you say at home. There are the subjects you avoid at family gatherings not to spoil the weekend, and you usually don't want all your neighbors to know what you've been up to over your vacations.

Social media being new, people didn't realize the consequences and started expressing stuff they wouldn't have otherwise.

Yes, people adapt, and share less. Perhaps it's social cooling, but maybe it needs cooling a little bit.
Many people are OK with it mostly because "the bad people" are targeted (they think, that is, those they disagree with).

If the pendulum swinged conservative in the future and you could get fired for excess "wokeness", the same people would be fuming with rage at the censorship.

Of course the conservative side (which is now all about free speech) did censor others amply when it had the upper hand (from McCarthy to the "parental advisory" stickers and album boycott campaigns from Mrs. Gore - funnily a Democrat, how times change).

Double standards as usual. If you want a free society, defend free speech for those you disagree with and consider "a danger".
10 years ago, social media platforms hadn't gamed their algorithms to oblivion. Platforms are the problem, this is the formula that maximizes engagement that benefits them and ad revenue. The real answer is probably just to ditch social media. I can't see any for-profit social media product ever not turning into a toxic cesspool.
I don't know the provenance of this stuff, any of it, it's presented as a raw dump so legwork is on us but at least individual PDFs are OCR'd. Firebugging the site and adding a rule for a:visited { color: purple } helps out when hunting for anything odd.

June 26, 1996 just 30 minutes past midnight - Lithuanian police spot a UFO "near the Lithuanian border": https://documents2.theblackvault.com/documents/cia/ufos/C055...

"Patrol officers Jaunius Pozera and Laimis Kraujalis placed the whole Vilnius police on the alert. Vehicle loads of soldiers from the Aras Rapid reaction force, sniffer dogs and police reinforcements immediately arrived on the scene of the emergency."

"At an altitude of 20-30 meters above the ground, they noticed a spherical object hanging and 'Pulsing,' alternately shrinking and expanding. At the same time, they heard what they described as 'a strange sound like an electric or electronic crackle,' wanting to take a closer look at the UFO, the policemen moved toward it. When they had advanced about 50 meters through the long grass, the police said, the sphere moved away, rose higher and rapidly departed in the direction of Vilnius."

" ... it was noted that the tall grass around the place over which the sphere had 'hung' was flattened to a radius of 10 meters.'

The geography of this FBI translation/writeup from Moscow's news agency is a bit bizarrely described, perhaps something definitely lost in translation, but it looks like it happened on the Lithuanian border with Belarus, some 10 miles away from the city.

"Police commissioner Valentinas Juchnevicius said in a radio interview today that both officers who watched the shining object 'are psychologically healthy, normal people, not noted for crankiness.'

Edit: this is fascinating. More of these I look at, more they look like a lazy search-and-dump of various US intelligence agencies' foreign media monitoring translations. For example, a translated Bosnian op-ed came up mentioning UFOs because the columnist was sarcastically complaining about how Washington normally communicates with extraterrestrials but yet can't find Karadzic (who'd been on the run for a time.)
Amazon doesn't host Facebook or Twitter, but they did host Parler.

Amazon told Parler they had to remove some very specific content or they would be sever their service, and Parler refused.

Amazon's letter terminating Parler calls out refusal to moderate content, not their inability to moderate content.
Perhaps better phrasing would be "No unnecessary drama"

If civil war breaks out - just say "my family is in danger and I need help"

Counter intuitively it can really help in sticky situations: I'm white and one of my employees is black. He didn't get a raise.

Instead of getting mad at me because he didn't get a raise, he put in our issue tracker - "Employees don't know how to calculate their pay range"

We now have an open skill system and and open salary system. We all know why each of us is paid our various rares and all of us know how to get to the next level.

We're also allowed to make mistakes - because there's not much drama, when some real drama comes up, we can deal with it.

One of my employees has nervous breakdowns now and then - not a problem because she's not having a breakdown while someone is kicking the copier and some else is playing CNN doom-news on their computer.

I can help her because I'm not already tapped out.
This is an after-the-fact tool.

For example:

- Kavanaugh confirmation hearings: did people feel unsafe? No.

- AOC leading a take over of Pelosi's office: No, probably the opposite. People were likely laughing about it and mildly annoyed.

- Mobs of people ransacking the capitol? Yeah, people felt _terrified_, and multiple people died.

See the difference? There's non-violent peaceful protest, and there's threats of violence, or actual violence, that one can feel in their bones, and which color the situation and subsequent charges should events fall out of line with our tradition of protest. Though events can't be known ahead of time, it's fairly easy in retrospect to judge intent -- i.e, AOC didn't enter Pelosi's office dressed in tactical gear and holding zip ties, with a mob of angry "Squad" members calling for the Senate minority leader's death.

It's offensive to common sense and morally dubious to compare these things, or to even bring them up in this context.
That is one thing that Apple is very consistent with. Other than fraying cables, Apple hardware is solid.

Whereas, I have replaced almost everything (keyboard, charger, battery, wifi/bluetooth) on my Dell XPS and the case is falling apart (broken monitor hinge glued back together). Its very frustrating..
The founder of Gab was kicked out of YC, right?
Just another confused person wondering why they just don't own their entire stack? If you ain't a rose don't plant yourself in a garden.
I did, but my first impression was that it was referring to more of his impression of public details around early circular wing research.

I am making these comments with fresh eyes without understanding him, his background, or context of these articles, so I suppose I will have to do more reading to further understand your arguments.
Pushback is absolutely crushed. It's impossible to really be an active user of most of these platforms without representing the desired view.
> safe space for people who believed certain things

What were these things? How right was too right, how left was too left?
The dump is "hacked data" that if I remember from two weeks ago, is supposed to be grounds for booting it off of every platform, yet archive.org is hosting it now and everyone is promoting it instead of banning links to it.

Why have the standards suddenly changed?
Incitement is violence.
> dictionary is impossible

I've got a Middle Egyptian dictionary in front of me right now.

> cannot keyboard it.

Manuel de Codage. I also use input methods for cuneiform. For a more modern example of this kind of thing, look at CJK input methods.

> impracticality of using pictures to represent verbs, adjectives, etc., anything but nouns with visual manifestations. (not that people don't try)

If you represent your language in pictures rather than try to make a special picture language, it is not that difficult.

> no past tense, no future tense

This is a feature of languages, not anything to do with the script. Look up Tense-Aspect-Mood if you are really interested.

For what it's worth, English has no future tense, but that has nothing to do with the Latin alphabet. It also doesn't prevent us from talking about actions in the future.

> there are a million English words. Imagine a million icons. (You can't.)

You can combine icons to form words.

> copyright law means everyone invents their own unique icons

I've read Egyptian hieroglyphic texts spanning two millennium. You get used to variation as the rule.

> the graphic for icons tends to get simplified over the years (where have we seen that before?)

Wasn't the case with Egyptian hieroglyphs, although arguably Hieratic exhibits this behavior.

> takes more paper to write the same text

In practice, a text in Egyptian hieroglyphs and its English translation are more or less the same length.

> hopelessness of OCR

It's harder, sure, but people are working on it.

> slow to draw them by hand

> takes years longer to learn than an alphabet

I'll give you those.
What happened with the developer of Mastodon?
If that’s what we are talking about I embrace and look forward to it!

I’ve been to enough museums, galleries, exhibits with people live streaming or FaceTiming that the pendulum swinging the other way would be a welcome change.
Exactly! This guy is saying it doesn’t count because...they didn’t perform well?? They didn’t achieve their goal? Had this been any more successful, it could have easily snowballed into a larger movement (and still might), so at this point I’d say it’s pretty OK for tech companies to pick a side.
Your content isn't anonymous: who you are is distilled from what you say, creating a unique fingerprint. Doesn't matter if you your name is hnaccy or SoSoRoCoCo.

I change details, times, various things, just a little. Whenever I need to make a reference as a citiation, 20% of the facts change just slightly. Sometimes I'm a woman, sometimes I'm from a different state, sometimes it is a different company I worked for. These details don't matter to the content, but there is so much contradiction in my history that I hope to defeat the algorithms. I got the idea from how Firefox defeats browser fingerprinting (or tries to).

I also create new accounts routinely.

However, even HN knows who I am because I occasionally forget to use my randomized VPN, and HN keeps track of you.

I know this because I was banned from an IP address once and had to renew it from my ISP to come back to HN.
Kyrie Irving for a real world example.
who do you think heads, runs espionage for, and utilizes the tr-3bs?
Looks good, but... Why is it geolocked? I can't download it in my County.
How much does it cost to use on S3? For example, how many GetObject and other misc non-free API calls does it use? And does it store data using intelligent tiering?
Yes; India is probably missing the occasional case here and there. But given their daily case numbers have been dropping quickly, they're probably finding most people who have covid.

If India's real number of active covid cases was 100x the official reported numbers, they still wouldn't have as many active cases per capita as the UK and USA.
> Beyond being technically incorrect (a firewall with a whitelist still works) ...

Does it really have to spelled out to you - it is meaningless to use an application firewall when you are not the one creating and controlling the whitelist!!

> if you don't trust Apple not to surreptitiously access your data, you can't rely on Apple-managed security mechanisms to enforce it.

Many of us don't - and that is why an operating system is extendable and we use third-party softwares on it. Just like we use anti-virus software on our OS. And sometimes we also use non-Apple softwares for products or features over Apple's because the third-party has a better product.

> The person I replied to had an even sillier version

Silly for you who are just evading the actual issue and instead want to try and focus the debate to "let's discuss your beliefs instead, and pretend everything is normal with an OS vendor deliberately crippling a useful software".

Yes, Apple does want access to your personal data. Yes, the deliberate crippling of firewalls on the macOS is an an ATTACK by Apple against its users towards this end. And yes, malwares can exploit the whitelist to hijack these whitelisted process.

All the other irrelevant babble you spouted on how you have to be "firewall admin" itself is laughable when all you have to do is toggle a button to control whether an app is allowed to connect to the internet.

> Defending against the OS vendor is close to impossible

It needn't be if the OS vendor has good intentions. And that's no excuse to shut up and not criticize them.
Something like organizing an assault on the nation's capital in order to overturn a vote?
How would you describe a hacker vs your average dev?
Simplest explanation is that Rebekah Mercer knows how to write a check but can't evaluate talent properly.
YouTube Suspends Trump’s Channel for at Least Seven Days
> Did you even bother to read the Newsweek article? It says they banned anyone posting left-leaning content.

It says this:

> Judging from the posts announcing that they've been booted, at least some of the banned Parler users seem to have signed up for the service precisely to test the limits of the app's so-called "freedom of speech" policy.

I read this to mean that people showed up to purposely troll hard enough to get banned so they could claim they got banned, and then they were. Your claim was that they don't "regularly ban people for violating their TOS with inappropriate content."

> So, at the same time, and for the first time in the six election cycles they've gone through, every single cloud provider came to the same conclusion and course of action without any outside pressure in a way that provides more evidence for antitrust behavior.

Even if there was outside pressure, you're still speculating that it was from law enforcement rather than the political branches.

How are you even sure this is the first time this has happened? Certainly it's the most high profile, but tech companies have been quietly disappearing "undesirables" for years.

> There is no timeline or even universe where Parler is competition for Facebook, Google, Apple or Amazon.

Not if they get ground into dust by competitors just as they're hitting the exponential growth stage.
In what part of the United States can a tenant not be immediately evicted for illegally presenting a clear and present mortal danger to public safety?
I thought it was called a "loicense"
> How much of this is that we’re getting older

Especially if your social media is facebook, i think the original users just got bored of it and adult life isn't that interesting. Mine is slowly filling up with baby pictures now and weddings now after what i think was a lull. Younger people seem to be going strong on sharing stupid things on snap chat and tiktok.
Parler wasn't e2e encrypted.
I'm one of these anti-logo folks (a severe case, I dislike text as an aesthetic and won't get anything with writing or symbols). I know, you're thinking "how can I find clothes without all that stuff?" And I'm here to tell you, it's simple: there are fewer choices to consider. See a rack full of a brand that thinks its logo is more appealing than your personal brand? Keep moving. Less choices, less option paralysis, less time shopping.

With men's clothes, you can buy plain shirts, socks, etc in 3-packs (there's few choices, but few are needed). Women's clothes tend offer more unbranded options, unless you're buying athletic wear or a purse. Casual shoes generally suck in this regard, for men and women.

This has been getting more difficult, of late. It used to be that logos were embroidered on tags or patches, which were then stitched onto the clothes. But with embroidery robots and the rise of counterfeiting, companies are making it more difficult to remove their brands.

edit: but practically? Thrift shops have a wealth of logo-free stuff
Are there no honorable and deluded people? The joint chiefs statement could be interpreted to make a pragmatic case for people in the military that a fight about election fraud is over and that maintaining the country and constitution is more important.
Inflame tensions. Make people feel even more so that they are not practically represented.

If you think its bad now, imagine if they had an actual legitament grievence :P
That's just a general kernel feature named binfmt_misc [1], just register the interpreter with the O flag. You can write your own binary translator and have the kernel run it for you, too.

[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/binfmt-mi...