skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The “news” section shows the last release was in 2019.

I noticed this too... is this project dead?

> Flash the bios with mr chromebox firmware...

I had not heard of this path before; is it a one-way trip to load linux on a Chrome OS device this way or can it be reverted to factory settings (when it's time to pawn the device off on someone else)?
The NYT can control what they print, and they are also responsible for what they print.

Twitter can control what it "prints", but is not responsible.

Those situations aren't the same. At all.

Historically, there were platforms (like newspapers) that had full control of what information they disseminated and had full responsibility for that information, and "common carrier" platforms (like the phone company) that did not control what information was disseminated and accordingly were not responsible for it.

Twitter and its brethren want the best of both worlds -- freedom to censor, but no responsibility.

They should have to choose one or the other.
This is complaining that you won't be able to get all the audience you want for a deranged mole people rant. It wasn't too long ago that there were only one or two TV channels in any one area - should the mole people rant have been a mandatory presence on those media as well?
Agreed. The title should be neutralized to something like “Elon Musk offers to purchase Twitter for $43B”
You may want to consider this: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279863242_Oxidative...

TLDR;
93/100 available studies (2015) confirm that low-intensity RF causes oxidative-stress mediated tissue damage (incl. DNA damage) and is implicated in a wide range of cancer and non-cancer pathologies.

TLDR2; its not just about power levels.
You're missing the point: Twitter doesn't sell you anything, you're the product. They sell ads.
TIL that, despite the fact that I vote and write and discuss things with my friends, my opinion doesn't exist because I don't share it on Twitter or Facebook.

come on man
I personally dislike Musk and most things he says and does, but I am grateful for the fact that his actions lead to more hilarious chronicles by Matt Levine (Money Stuff).

Can't wait for today's installment!!!
As an independence supporting Scot, I'm not much of a fan of the UK "state media" but even I can recognize that the BBC is no Rossiya. So that's who I name. UK.
I have no idea how Europe handles libel, but it's interesting how Singapore uses it. The Prime Minister regularly sues people who accuse him of corruption. Most of it is deserved, but the requirements for libel are so low that conviction is more likely than not.

Interestingly, if fined more than $2,000 (most libel fines are in $100,000's), you are no longer able to hold political office in Singapore. That's also true in the UK (no idea the threshold - I think it's a prison term?).

Interesting way to silence any opposition.
Thank you for the suggestion. It might be a nice way to start with a book like this.
I understand better now, you are really applying "dark" to the infrastructure (which happens to have fiber-optic cable) rather than to the fiber itself. The infrastructure is figuratively dark, and the fiber is literally lit.
If he's so rich and smart, just make a better Twitter and people will flock to it, right?

I mean, I thought he's for the invisible hand of the market yadda yadda yadda.
Has he actually proposed anything that we know of? Other than his polls I guess? I saw one for an edit button and one to remove the w from the name.
Free speech is never 100% free, there are laws against libel, fraud, conspiracy, copyright, trademark, which create crimes that consist only of speech, or civil liability. Courts and parliaments have rules of procedure so it's not, whoever's loudest wins. And then there are social norms.

Slippery slope arguments are a slippery slope to never doing anything to improve anything.

It's always a balance between letting 20% of hateful crazy troll Nazis hijack all rational conversation, on the one hand, and blocking unpopular opinions on the other hand. Even HN moderates a lot.

Same applies to all the rights enumerated in the US Constitution, you have freedom of religion to the extent it doesn't infringe on the other important rights and provisions of the Constitution. Polygamy is banned. If your religion says servitude of women or Black people is God's will, you don't get to practice it. 2nd Amendment however broadly interpreted doesn't let you build a nuclear weapon in your backyard.

Also true, a lot of people want to block legitimate speech they don't want to hear and should be resisted. The first step toward fascism is indeed people not caring about free speech and thinking their personal discomfort is the most important thing, starting with the most powerful. Protesters get arrested and kettled, Colin Kaepernick loses his contracts. You're not going to stop the powerful from trying. It's never 'cancel culture' when state legislatures cancel women, minorities, gay or trans people, it's only 'cancel culture' when those people call out the powerful.

We need free speech, but letting liars and extremists run the public square and destroy all decency isn't the answer either. You need to protect free speech by having reasonable rules and norms.

"Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness." - George Washington
The view that Facebook is an utility assumes the world only consists of the United States. If it’s a utility and 75% of its users are outside the US, whose utility is it? The UN?
The state of web browsers in 2022
Google is an advertising company. Their productivity apps exist for one reason --- privacy invasion/data collection --- in support of their advertising objectives.

Using Google apps for anything other than advertising is like going to a medical doctor for a toothache. You might receive something that temporarily eases the pain but the root problem remains largely unsolved.
You know, that's not the most unlikely theory. I've wondered why clubs reopening only had seemingly little effect on covid spread...
I hope in vain for a return to pre-web 1.0 -- when we were able to read without being watched. Many a revolution probably happened due to that "feature" of paper books ... which we lost when we went online with words.
"I'm a proponent of the idea of "the solution to bad speech, is more speech", but if you take this to its logical conclusion on the internet, you often end up in the wild west."

If that's the logical conclusion, and I'm making the assumption this based on your observations, why are you a proponent of it?

"I think this is for the best, however it always leads to problems"
This seems to be a dynamic language thing. Could statically typed languages have some uses for it? In Java one might use a lot of constant strings which are keys for property files. You can of course do some dynamic stuff in order to construct them but they are more likely to be used as constant strings. Would using a separate construct for that make optimization easier? Or wouldn’t it make a difference in practice?
I always get a sense of achievement when I side-step the analysis of a problem with a stupid, straight-forward simulation script (usually probability questions).

It may burn several seconds of CPU and still get me only 3 significant digits, when a one-step solution exists. But I'm more confident in the result because the script is near-impossible to get wrong, compared to some theory I just learned, or a probability distribution that turns out to have conflicting definitions what its parameters mean.
There's nothing holding people back from returning to Web 1.0.

HTTP 1.1 is still a thing.
Static webpages are still a thing.
IRC is still a thing.

Even better, host it on a P2P network like I2P where those on the network have to get over the hurdle of knowing about it in the first place and being able to set it up, just as early web users had to know how to plug in a modem, install a browser, and use those "URL" things.

If your pages provide value, people will still find them in any case.

Oh... but you wanted Web 1.0 content with Web 3.0 levels of traffic.

Well, you're not gonna get that. Pick your poison.
Lower input latency, too, which makes for more-pleasant typing.
Oh, to my knowledge web servers (and mail servers, etc.) get attacked all the time. So do routers, IoT devices and so forth.

But those attacks work differently from a user innocently clicking a link they received via email or opening an attachment. And your desktop machine typically doesn't have any services exposed to the Internet.

I think Android malware is a thing, but I don't know enough about this to be less vague.
I have about a dozen Pentium and 486 machines sitting in the attic. I wonder how long until they become valuable ($XXXX) artifacts.
The power of the megaphone is what's he's buying. Idk what "Truth Social" is, and that's precisely the point: it isn't worth a dime. Musk is buying users by the millions. Attention craving users, but still users.
"fear porn scaremongering throughout the pandemic with microchips in the vaccines,"

Any of the algorithmic timelines are generally horrible, agreed.

I follow only people who tweet and retweet reasonable things. I use the timeline with content only from the people I choose to follow ("Latest"), and don't follow lunatics. This is a fairly nice experience, but needs a curated list of people to follow, building of which needs a while.
That's cool. When I'm bored I usually just fire up a game in my Steam backlog, but whatever.
John Stuart Mill is considered an absolutist and he invented the harm principal.

This is because shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater is not a free exchange of ideas, it’s enticement of injury.

Here’s the gist of it: “Mill argued that even any arguments which are used in justifying murder or rebellion against the government shouldn't be politically suppressed or socially persecuted. According to him, if rebellion is really necessary, people should rebel; if murder is truly proper, it should be allowed. However, the way to express those arguments should be a public speech or writing, not in a way that causes actual harm to others. Such is the harm principle: "That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."”
You can easily see 5 environment variables ending in "_KEY" stored in "window.__INITIAL_STATE__"... crazy this got into production...

view-source here -> https://iview.abc.net.au/
You may do, but the self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist" trying to buy Twitter thinks that making certain claims and revealing certain information about his companies is not at all fine, hence all the litigation against critical former employees
Makes me think of a question I've pondered but to which I don't have an answer: is there a way to use Libre Office synched through cloud storage such that multiple people can work on different parts of the same document at the same time and see each other's changes?
Kindergarten is more than just US / American English:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindergarten#By_country
Tell me you've never worked on a team trying to address these issues without telling me you've never worked on a team trying to address these issues.
Is is a bit more nuanced than that. This web client needs access to non-secret keys that are passed via environment variables. This is absolutely commonplace.

However there are two real issues here: first, some bug in the code is causing all environment variables to be dumped into the JS bundle. You can see that in inane keys like PATH, HOME, PORT.

This issue wouldn't be such a huge problem by itself. The second problem is that during the build process for the frontend, there are environment variables that shouldn't be there, such as the secret ones. The CI or build machine should have been well isolated enough to prevent this problem from happening.

This is a problem in the CI coupled with a bad build process.
dear diary...

In any case, Google has plenty of competition in the areas you're talking about. Try the Office suite + Microsoft Ads.
Rat Park drug experiment comic (2013)
The main problem here is that houses and software have wildly different marginal costs

It is "a" problem, I'll even admit a major one, but it's not the main problem. The main problem is the expectation of continual customization and improvement at the input of the customer. Imagine if houses were built by you contracting with the developer, and after the initial blueprint and plans were agreed to, every two or 4 weeks you came back with requests to do new things like "add a basement bathroom", or "push out the back another 5 feet and add a glass skylight there for a sunroom", or "change the roof tiling to something 30% heavier".

Even without the regulatory hurdles and permits, nothing would get built as a sheer matter of physics. Blueprints and architecturally sound structures take some basic customer requests at the outset, and then make dozens of important, non-easily reversible technical decisions known to an expert to be required to support those requests. You can't just add on new customer-desired trappings without vastly compromising the quality of those assumptions for the original design.

But that is the situation in modern "agile" software development, and why selling it is so weird - because nothing else we'd say requires professional skill is built this way, and the real profit comes from annual recurring revenue - not a one time sale. Even wedding cakes have limits to change after the initial tiers are baked.
The only people complaining about free speech are literally right-wingers spreading verifiable lies (and this includes non US right-wingers). The fact that this is an issue is a tragic flood of propaganda by these liars.
Well now you're just making a "no true vaccine skepticism" argument. We heard concerns about massive increases in blood clots, in infertility, that it would kill more people than covid, that it changed your DNA, that it increased rates of miscarriage, a ton of wild and crazy things and even more mundane things like because you could still get COVID afterwards the shot was worthless. You can't just say "well, us REAL sceptics (sic) only believed a and b, but not c-z, therefore all the skepticism was correct."
I have to admit: I hope this happens mostly for the entertainment value.

Also, I think that this business of shutting down opinions of people we dislike or disagree with is really bad for society long term. I think Musk might stop that.
I don't understand the rational behind throwing away one of the most useful, most brilliant, and most valuable resource humans have created just because it has a few major problems. There's a strong argument in favor of fixing the problems, sure, but the world without the modern web would be significantly worse, not least because 90% of HN users wouldn't have jobs.
Interested in hearing your take on Bill Gates' qualifications in various segments...
OK. I'm a huge admirer of everything Musk has a accomplished, but... W.T.F.?

Taking on Twitter will not only be a huge amount of work, it is likely consume a ridiculous amount of talent -- which could be focused instead on building next-generation humanoid robots, electric vehicles, energy solutions, reusable spaceships, and space stations.

Musk has a long history of taking on more than it's humanly possible, but so far he has been narrowly avoided failure. Recall that Tesla was ready to file for bankruptcy at one point in 2019.[a]

He hasn't sold any shares, so he's likely borrowing against his Tesla stock to finance this hostile takeover, exposing himself to all sorts of potentially ugly debt squeezes.

I really, really, really hope Twitter doesn't become a black hole that sucks talent and energy away from more important things. More than that, I hope this latest battle doesn't become Musk's Waterloo.

--

[a] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/03/musk-tesla-was-about-a-month...
The two situations aren’t really comparable. The ABC, or the minister responsible for selecting it’s CEO (it’s owned and funded by the gov as a corporate entity, but not run by it) would be laughed out of the room if they suggested that the author should be charged.
We're not sure he really wants to buy Twitter. This could simply be a stunt.

I don't think he works too much; on the contrary, I think he's bored.
To avoid distractions it's simpler just to turn off Wi-Fi or to take your laptop somewhere where there is no Wi-Fi you can access. I got a lot of programming done at my kids' piano teacher's house.
Many of us share this nostalgia for the early-day, long-tail pioneer phase.

I feel business model innovation is the key to moving the pendulum back towards that landscape - that the ad model will also result in centralization in which we are the product?
Quite a few countries have laws from the 1980s that basically say "gaining unauthorised access to computer systems is a crime"

Which is of course a very expansive definition. Think you've found a leaked database credential and you test it before reporting, so as not to create a false alarm? That's illegal hacking. Almost any persistent XSS? That's illegal hacking. Access an admin panel by entering a default password? You guessed it, illegal hacking.

We might get the impression these laws don't exist, because they aren't enforced internationally or if the hacker can't be identified - so black-hat hacking, cryptolockers, tech support scams, giant data breaches and suchlike go completely unpunished. But a white-hat hacker who identifies themselves in hopes of getting their security report taken seriously might well get a visit from the cops.
Do you have any evidence the laptop story suppression wasn't a mistake?
Ask HN: Why did HN just go down?
For a couple minutes, Hacker News was returning 502 Bad Gateway error codes with the message that "We're having some trouble serving your request. Sorry!".

Any idea what happened?
DoD to build project Pele mobile microreactor
Ditto! B2B is alive and well. I absolutely prefer it because it's a far more rational interaction and sales process. Margins can be higher and it's a better class of customers most of the time.
> I think the point is that 4chan mode would be the “absolute free speech” mode. And if that is where we are going, it will be quite a ride. I can’t imagine Twitter surviving it, but it will be interesting.

I think what I've learned from 4chan is that words like (redacted) shit general in /g/ or calling OP a (redacted) is ok on 4chan specifically. Except the name(redacted) and trip(redacted), we are all pseudonymous there so when someone says you are a (redacted), they don't mean to say you are of a specific ethnicity or gender. It means you are acting like an idiot or something they disapprove of?

I can imagine a 21+ social media network that has no explicit moderation but you would still need protection from spam, flooding, and other bad actors once you get to a certain size.
Remember that the Theory of Relativity came about because of discrepancies with Newton's laws of mechanics and observations of the planets' orbits.

Hopefully this opens doors for plenty of new research and discoveries.
Social media has it's drawbacks, but large hosted services exist for good reasons and have spawned entire new industries. An independent artist couldn't host a server to share their work (especially if they want to share content like video widely), or run a store capable of handling a spike of traffic if they became popular. Also the network effects of the platforms give huge benefits allowing at least a portion of promising diamonds in the rough to be found and shared (even if they are mixed in with a bunch of dumb clickbait and cheap knockoffs of products as discussed in the recent Etsy boycott thread).

It's definitely not all roses, but I don't really see a clear path out of this. Because for whatever feelings people have about big tech, YouTube, Facebook, Etsy, Instagram have all driven billions in business for non-tech companies. And they've done it by creating experiences that are engaging to end consumers. Sure we might see traffic exchange hands among the big players, and there will be other successful new networks like we have seen with TikTok. But I think people don't want to self host for good reasons.
This is playing out like the Russian invasion.
It sounds like you should be unhappy with your own addictive tendencies and not necessarily Twitter. You may want to reach out to a specialist if you feel this is negatively impacting your life, as you'll likely start doing the same with some other app.
Why can't they not be responsible and censor, how are these related?
A company in Switzerland has an interesting business model:

You buy a bee hotel (or bee hotels). They provide you with a tube containing a few fresh bee larvae every year before the wild bee season. After the season, you return the filled tubes. They remove parasites etc. and sell the resulting bee larvae for their commercial business with farmers etc. The biannual exchange is free. There is also minimal gamification because you can compare your success with other bee hotel owners from the same company.

https://fr.wildbieneundpartner.ch/ (in French)
Just the fact that it mentions NaCl means it must have been written in the 2013-2014 era.
The government grants charters to corporations. Corporations are thus franchisees of the state. The idea that corporations are sovereign rule makers for society and not bound to the laws of the land is misguided.

If the government charters corporations that suppress free speech, then they are effectively making a law that abridges free speech.
I wrote a fairly large and involved desktop app in Python and PyQt5 to enable me to execute a project I was on where I the functional safety engineer for some fairly serious industrial Burner Management Systems, for a lithium processing plant.

The app enabled me to define the behavior of the BMS system as a state machine represented by a table (using PyQt tableview). It also simulated execution of the code as would be implemented, one scan at a time.

Once there, I added a bunch of tools to print out reports/documentation, run diff against models, extract transition comments where certain tags or similar existed (eg show all transitions with a comment that include "IEC 61511"), version tracking, etc etc etc.

It might sound slightly a trivial problem on first description, but one of the systems had ten burners and it ended up being a hierarchical set of 15 state machines 3 deep and it would have been almost impossible to define the behavior on paper - simulation picked up heaps of minor sequencing issues and allowed us to correct them before actual software was written and tested.

Basically, I ended up with an executable specification (not far off the IEC 61499 dream) that self documented. I could have made it write the core PLC code and export it as XML for import to the PLC programming tool, but it was sort of break even to go that far on SIL 2 systems, so I did not go the full distance on that. At one stage it looked like we might go SIL 3, so this would have been useful in that case.

In the end, I put in maybe 1200 hours to build this, in my spare time. Lots of late nights for well over a year, but I don't think we could have really done the project well without it, or something like it.

I looked at it, and decided to actually commercialize it in the form where I could maybe sell/give it to random punters was whole new level of effort. Plus it seemed to be the sort of software that people go broke trying to sell and support, so I just use it for my own purposes now.
> Coming from a country that had made a transition from a (rather messy) democracy to an authoritarian fascist police state in just 15 years, I tell you this: it all started with limits on the freedom of speech.

Was this the government restricting speech, or private enterprise?