skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think it's a free speech issue. It's just a scalability / UX issue arising from the problem that 100,000 people are trying to communicate in the same room, and 99% of those people have nothing new to add to the conversation. The self-moderation features on Reddit and HN are a step in the right direction. On Twitter and Facebook, there is no downvoting, which amplifies low quality content. This decision is tied to their revenue generation models, because they don't want to limit participation. Reddit and HN focus on improving signal to noise-ratio, which is more important metric, and I think even more can be done in this direction.
I don't know what anyone means by "free speech" sometimes.

Often I think it is just "I get to say what I want." but beyond that they've no idea.
It was extremely well known. What you're doing is how Foxnews, the number one cable news network in many situations, claims a story isn't being reported on by the "main stream media".
Derren Brown is such an incredible rabbit hole to fall down, the passion he has for the craft of illusions and mentalism really shine through.

Recently he's shifted towards an honesty that I really appreciate, about where he's coming from and his own abilities. It feels so much more genuine, which makes it connect so well.
Does HN count as social media? If not, I haven't used social media in some years. And to see me on the street, you wouldn't even know I'm a weirdo.
Twitter has immense influence on the zeitgeist than any other single media property. For a person like Musk, $43B is an investment that would pay for itself in short order by the various kinds of market manipulation he could engage in. He has cheated so many times without consequence. Why not take it to the next level? Pump and dump, favorable sentiment for his companies, signal boosting his pocket politicians, and so on. Truly frightening.
Function over form. I think it makes a lot of sense in Rusts' domain.
>If you somehow get it onto the platform, and they are made aware of it, they can unpublished it.

And that's called censorship.
The Six Stages of Internal Development Platforms
UKIP is "far-right?" That's a very strange way to describe them, but whatever.

The trial itself was fast, but he had two years of waiting with the charges (and potential jail time) hanging over his head.

In any case, would you support similar legal action against the creators of Father Ted?

https://youtu.be/sLNMSTQnSyk
Drive is incredible…ly terrible.

Our non-technical staff (and some good technical people too) are always losing track of where files are. They write a doc then can’t find it later.

The desktop tool (so you can use it like Dropbox) keeps getting confused and disconnecting on the Mac.

I’m also part of a scout troop that uses google to organize its activities. In the troop’s Drive I’ve found doctor’s patient records, the marketing plan for a major public company often mentioned on HN, and other documents clearly accidentally stored/shared with this group.
I don't think that's reasonable. I don't think it's ok that North Korea systematically tortures huge numbers of people to death, or that huge numbers of Tutsis were slaughtered in Rwanda, or that for many decades South Africa systematically subjugated the majority of their population.

Internal affairs can very quickly become international issues. Civil wars have a habit of spilling over borders, and refugee crises such as due to the situation in Syria affect nations on other continents. There are always knock-on effects.

We should never have tolerated Russia's mercilessly brutal subjugation of Chechnya. We deplored their activities in Syria, but eh, Syria is far away. What they're doing in Ukraine is basically the same, but now it's in Europe so that's different. That's pure hypocrisy. There is a direct line to be drawn from what Russia did in Chechnya, joining the dots through Georgia, Syria and the Donbas directly to the attack on Kyiv. None of that should ever have been tolerable, but we did tolerate it.

We should be kicking up a huge fuss over the treatment of the Uighurs, the minimal sanctions we're imposing now is the diplomatic equivalent of ineffectual hand wringing. It's tacit acceptance that this sort of behaviour is acceptable. After all, we are accepting it.
Agree with everything you wrote except "maybe more people will start using Mastodon".

I didn't even know this existed until you said it, which doesn't bode well for mass adoption given that I'm someone who's on the internet daily.

Moreover, Mastodon.com is owned by a forestry machine business, and googling Mastodon gives a first result for a rock/metal band. I think "Mastodon.social" might be about as bad as a web address can get for mass appeal / catchiness.
Most of Derren Brown's live shows are amazing but I was really disappointed with his How to Win the Lottery show.
This title is clearly some sort of propaganda. This from the country that flies drones around telling people to stay inside?
Haha, perfect!
People like the moderation policies of Hacker News but not the ones of Twitter. This isn't some grand hypocrisy.
"Going luddite is never a good solution."

Change is merely change, neither good nor bad. Same for absense of change.
These are the 100 most frequent LaTeX commands
Content may have been a poor word choice. What I meant is that comments here are rarely moderated because the message in the comment is deemed wrong by the moderators.
Windows is already Unicode and has been since Windows 2000. The internal representation however is UTF-16.

This is in contrast to the article you are commenting on, where Java hasn’t had a consistent default representation in Unicode until now.
I think you'd find dehosting was more prevalent in the USSR and the eastern block than the west even now.
I half agree. The CCP already has a lot of tools to wield power over any company that doesn’t play ball. This law will become part of that tool kit, but not much different from the status quo in that regard.

The real change here is making it easier to enact soft censorship. If you want less people talking about a topic, right now the primary tool is outright censorship by the state. I think what the CCP wants is to let people post on a subject, but nobody sees your post, with a net effect that the subject falls out of public discourse without being outright censored.
>Even free speech absolutists agree that falsely yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre

I would really want this stop being quoted so often, because the context in which it was originally used didn't advocate free speech at all.
> Might makes right.

Yes. This is true. We live in a US hegemony, enhanced globally by the fall of the USSR. This situation may change in the future, it may not. When we initially sanctioned Cuba we were primarily able to do so because Cuba geographically exists within the US sphere of influence. Now the entire globe exists within the US sphere of influence.

I don't think my earlier reply to you qualifies as "rhetoric". I was replying to the implication that the US just unilaterally decided to sanction Cuba for no good reason. The US had a good reason, it is pretty obvious what that reason was, and it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that Cuba's actions resulted in sanctions (and could have resulted in much worse). It is also, frankly irrelevant, that it was precipitated by the US doing something stupid.

Personally, I think we should have dropped the embargo on Cuba a long time ago, probably in the 90s. But that's not the case right now. It certainly wasn't a mystery to anyone why it started though.

Sanctions on Russia and sanctions on North Korea are both not only "might makes right", but fully justified within multiple different deontological frameworks. It is absolutely true that there is realpolitik afoot here, but that does not also preclude the possibility that the outcome is justified and fair.

Honestly, I'd love to hear/read some thoughts as to why dropping sanctions on North Korea would be beneficial to /anyone/ in a real way.
> So if we have lot of different options to access information and your views are still unwelcome in all but the most extreme places, then I think it reflects quite poorly on your views. You might not get a platform, but that doesn't mean you're being persecuted.

Historically, this perspective has proven to be laughable. Criticism of Putin can hardly be found except for the most extreme places (in some locations)
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the majority of those companies already did that with the Hunter Biden laptop story.

If only Fox News is covering something and you’re not allowed to talk about it on Twitter, Facebook, etc. then there’s no effective way for it to reach everyone who doesn’t watch Fox.
I saw this for the first time last week and have since gotten this several times. Often opening the site in Incognito mode "fixes" it, but I would not expect a Bad Gateway error to returned in case of any user-specific throttling or anything so I put it down to a coincidence.
“Algorithmic recommendation service providers shall actively disseminate positive energy, and promote the application of algorithms to be good.”... Are free and fair elections "good"? Is one party rule the best guarantee for "positive energy"? This is so ridiculous coming from a non-democracy...
Exactly. They make major decisions, give you less than 3 months to completely change things you depend on. And you can't even get someone on the phone (or even email for god-sake) to complain to.
Yes, there are covid nasal sprays being developed all over the world. Also Birmingham, Oxford (UK), Tours (France)...
A response I gave elsewhere in this thread with a presentation that Randi gave: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31027409
Dehosting is insane when you consider that your domain registrar and DNS providers can deplatform you as well.
> This is one case where an equivalence argument is actually valid.

Hardly. Being a Jew is an immutable trait. Being a Nazi is a behavior choice.
Ironically, my previous job was an internship at a big valley company, who's former HQ is now occupied by one of the biggest valley companies. There, I needed to ship a bunch of equipment to another office. It needed to be there in 3 weeks, but the soonest the shipping department could pick it up was 4 weeks for some reason. However, there was an unspoken agreement w/the folks there that anything that made it to the shipping area would be shipped w/no questions asked as long as it "just appeared" there. So, over the course of a few nights, I stayed late and moved the equipment to the dock, labeled it appropriately, and everything made it to the destination on time.
ACLU of 2021 no longer supports free speech. The ACLU of the 80s and 90s were a bastion of free speech.
> Capabilities should not be visible to users of the Rust language what-so-ever and should only exist in the compiler, and nowhere else.

One important use of Rust is operating systems, allocators, and JIT compilers where security is important and interacting with capabilities is expected. You’ll really want some way to represent them in the language for these usecases.
"I've called Google to try to talk to them"...

Currently contemplating this, but am certain it will leave me with a feeling of "well, I'll never get that 30 minutes back"
Four types of online communities and value you get from being a participant
The question is further interesting because social media already tried to answer it: you do, for yourself!

At scale, with naive ML clustering algorithms that also prioritize engagement... that devolves into bubbles.

(I think that's still the right answer, but the implementations need work.)
China doesn't have rule of law. This is like termites proposing a new structure for wooden home construction.
I don't think they're exaggerated. They're awful problems, and much reform is needed. However, I don't doubt that it's used to attack particular politicians, but the US isn't a "shining city upon a hill" providing the great example for all other countries to emulate. We have our own significant problems, and so long as we have them our moral grandstanding loses some of it's effect internationally.
Babson Task
I find it hilarious when this paradox is trotted out because Popper’s final conclusion was we should tolerate intolerance up until it promotes imminent violence.

He’d be entirely opposed to censoring intolerant views the way most people think of intolerance.
I would never use google for my business. I would rather self host it, especially with a small team or solo.
> the boring office work of rockets, tunnels, robots, AI, and of course bullet-proof trucks.

..

> not sarcasm

hmm
This (the Musk thing) isn't about that though, right? It's just him wanting the platform to be more open, not wanting the government to require that any particular platform be open.
I am also an American who disagrees with those European laws, though I understand them and why they came to pass. It's one of the difficulties of the issue: Free speech used to be more of a national problem, now it's larger, and, as you mentioned, international law and culture add even more variables to consider.

I understand the desire to abide by European standards, because the Holocaust in particular was so horrific, but there are countries that have laws against things like promoting homosexuality, so clearly legality can't be the only moral arbiter here because the laws are a.) contradictory and b.) we recognize authoritarian governments make oppressive laws and we shouldn't comply with them. Which means we need another standard, one that defines Holocaust denial as impermissible but discussions of being gay as fine.

I don't think anybody should HAVE to host holocaust denial, but if somebody does, they shouldn't be attacked for it. (And 'attacked' meaning attempts made to take down the content/sue facetiously/DDOSing, etc. Nothing stopping people from mocking the host or pulling their money).

I'm also wary of things like 'hosting anti-semitism' as a justification, because what is considered anti-semitic varies (like most kinds of bigotry). Is it anti-semitic to criticize the government of Israel? What about the gender issues in Ultra-Orthodox communities? (I'm not Jewish, but I feel the same way about groups that I am a part of: I might not LIKE being called a dyke, seeing somebody say all homosexuals are depraved degenerates, etc. but that's not the same as calling for my murder or trying to get me fired.)
The "Big Platforms" used to be newspapers, and then TV.... there has always been editing and curation.

Social Media actually was a huge "democratization" of the ability to give a very large voice to some very minority views.

Previously we had subjective - but real - barriers to having a voice.
Size. Market penetration of Twitter is orders of magnitude above that of Nintendo or your friend. You should rather ask: how does influence scale relative to size?
For reference, Compuserve was an ISP that historically didn't moderate ony of its content on its forums, under the legal framework that not moderating anything meant Compuserve wasn't liable for any of its content, while another ISP Prodigy lost a defamation lawsuit because they did moderate their forum's content. This gave rise to the Communications Decency Act which allows these services to moderate some content without being civilly liable for all of the content on their service.

Compuserve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe#Legal_cases

Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod....

Legal Eagle video if you prefer his video format: https://youtu.be/eUWIi-Ppe5k?t=243
> Honestly it's tiring.

As is the steady stream of people who take every opportunity to point out how much America sucks.
Twitter is completely unusable if you hadn't joined years ago, or are a famous person.
I get this. My girlfriend does mocell bio and her project requires her to do some informatics. She’s now into bioinformatics and she starts by already having a problem to solve. Compsci makes you find a problem to use a tool, coming from outside let’s you find the tool for the problem which IMO moves “faster” in the brain.
Classic situation where "Only a Sith Deals in Absolutes".

In practice, there is a tension. Absolute free speech is not necessarily safe - the Weimar Republic was a time of unprecedented freedom of expression and it ended badly. The freedom paradox is real: too much freedom can result in the death of freedom, by tolerating anti-freedom movements enough for them to snowball.

Also, you shouldn't assume that these "practical limits" on free speech are new, particularly for the US. In the second postwar period, airing leftist views often resulted in people being put under invasive surveillance - or worse.

There is always a tension in practice, and it's about finding an acceptable set of compromises. Germany is free but you can't print Hitler's works there, and that's just fine.
Don’t you think that a bot could not brute force everyday’s wordle every morning for a tiny amount of processing power? There are solving strategies out there that will solve it with a minimum amount of attempts. So all it would do is add a tiny delay to todays bot being a nuisance.
Threading from Scratch
As somebody who is banned on Twitter for unclear reasons, I can unequivocally say that this is preferable to being thrown in jail or fined by the government
It's a challenge for everybody. Having to put people who aren't computer savvy through it is just a reminder of what a pain in the ass it is... The fact that we can self-service doesn't make it less of an annoyance than we have to do something.

And at this point, the pattern is clear. Google Business products are free until they are not. Building them into your infrastructure is taking on technical debt that you will have to pay down in the future, either by actually buying the product when they decide it is no longer free or by switching to an alternative.

I still run into websites with a big API disabled rectangle where their Google maps integration used to be.
> And maybe that’s okay.

No, it's not okay because it leaves victims in its wake. NPD[1] can result in broken families, friendships that don't materialize, loneliness, depression, suicidality. That's not to say that you shouldn't look out for yourself, but if you're only looking out for yourself then it's basically self-imposed isolation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disor...
I'm not making the trip. It sounds like you're saying users are moving files to the the wrong folders on their computers and the desktop tool respects that. What should the software do differently?
As you pointed out, I am saying there might be at least a remote chance of a negative result.

More importantly, I can’t really put my finger on any kind of potential positive result for the employee.

In my mind if you “do the math” on that situation, there’s no reason to ever reveal your intentions except in extraordinary scenarios. There’s only downside and slim to no upside.

I think what you describe is kind of like betting on red and black at the roulette table. Sure, you’ll get your money back most of the time, but if you ever hit 0 or 00 you’ve gone bust, and you can never do anything besides get your money back. There’s essentially no reason to bet at all.

Also, keep in mind that so many people work for actively terrible management and can’t just instantly rectify that. Not all management comes into power off of merit like you suggest, many are members of the family business or friends of the director/VP. In that scenario, to answer your “why are you still working there?” question, the answer is “to put food on the table.”
Incentives. No ads. No engagement (paperclip) maximizers.
Have you considered the very low-tech solution of simple HTML anchors to link back and forth?
It seems simple enough to just generate the conversation as one big page, then break it up. As you traverse the tree, save a list of indices of top-level comments and store the (recursive) sum of children sizes, then split appropriately. This might be slow with millions of nodes, but I don't understand how that process alone would be slow with hundreds.

What would be slow (and may be happening), is generating that dynamically for every page refresh on a busy story by every visitor (i.e. no caching).
If I were to get on twitter right now and start posting my opinions, no one would give a shit. There's something else going on that is promoting polarizing opinions and making these forums devolve.
The golden age of the Internet was also distinctly different because I'd wager that the majority of people online back in those days had some technical know-how. You knew you were interacting with people who could operate a computer well enough to dial-up to an ISP so generally they were fairly intelligent.

As nostalgic as it is, I think if you were to really strive for that type of world again you need to move forward with building a new network - something that requires some measure of intelligence in order to gain access to it. Of course, what's then stopping someone from automating that and repeating the cycle all over again?

Better off just carving out your little piece in this new massive online world and building a community - or - just join one that already exists. There's millions of forums and "hand-made" websites out there, you just need to dig a little deeper these days.
I can usually find the docs I've created pretty easily--but then I'm pretty good about sensibly filing things.

But finding random Shared with Me is pretty problematic especially if I don't know exactly what I'm looking for. And, of course, as you say, if you're sharing docs, it's pretty easy to share with someone you don't mean to. Of course, the same could be said with sending around docs on email.
I once had a Slack call where I muted my mic, the UI updated to show it was muted...

And my mic was still on. Needless to say I never used Slack calls again.
I have used everything from google (as a typical user and as dev using their GCP) and everything they do "works" I feel like they do something messy and that's it. Kind of let's throw products and the client will figure out and if it isn't successful or we lose our main team we shut down the product.
Not at all, the external provider (cloud/tor) is still untrusted, I never implied that. It is a risk reduction strategy. If you care about security you must define threat model and risk boundaries.
> It's hard for me to square the price he's offering with the promises he's making about Twitter's potential profitability.

Those promises are predicated on him owning it though.

I'm doubtful of Twitter's LTV whether he owns it or not, but then again I've never had an account and now that you pretty much can't read it without one, I basically don't use it at all. So I may not be a qualified observer, but to me Twitter seems to only get worse for years now.

If that price isn't reasonable for Twitter long-term then you must have someone other than the current management in mind to realise that value...
I think everyone on the Internet has heard of that paradox by now, and it is always misinterpreted by people who only want their speech to be allowed.

Popper was talking about literal Nazis. We do not know what percentage of the numerous Twitter bans he would have approved (my guess is around 5%). We do not know if he would have been astonished by the fact that proponents of his paradox never use it against overt communist propaganda but only against alleged fascist propaganda (the bar for being called a Nazi has never been lower).