skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I mean if you write an app that walks and talks like my app, without stealing my source, it is fair game and I can do nothing. Unless I explicitly patented some specific aspects that you also implemented, or you stole my branding, or I can prove you stole my source code, you did not violate a single thing.

Music business, meanwhile, behaves as if everything was patented by default.
If you have any proof feel free to drop it.

The thing that has historically made a company bound to free speech is whether or not the government requires them to specifically search for certain types of infringing content. Coincidentally, this is the current legal framework that makes reporting images of child abuse legal: companies can voluntarily choose to to either not scan for CSAM, or can choose to scan for CSAM and must report it to NCMEC if they find any, and Apple is a prime example of a company that doesn't scan for it[0].

If the government is asking a company to go searching for specific otherwise legal content, that would be pretty good evidence for a court case to be made.

0: "Of all of the companies identified by NCMEC, I only saw one that had an unexpected decrease in reporting: Apple. According to NMEC, Apple submitted 205 reports in 2019 (a third my my reporting volume). Apple increased a little, to 265 in 2020, but then dropped in 2021 to only 160 reports. That's nearly a 22% decrease over two years!" https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/955-NC...
> This is one case where an equivalence argument is actually valid

Yes, absolutely, banning Nazism is 100% equivalent to killing Jews. Freedom of speech definitely depends on letting nazis spread their views. Declaring that nazis are bad for society is a dangerous view.

Totally normal things to say.
We Need More Copper
I completely agree with you in the abstract, but I worry primarily about this chain of causality:

Network effects -> market forces -> political will

I think splitting up these giants is supremely important, but the only healthy approach long term is to require open APIs for cross-service interoperability. This is the only solution to separate network effects from market forces.

It's not unreasonable to want to be able to communicate with your friends, family, and brands you like in a convenient way.

_Either_ you require interoperability so that people can separate their (real) social networks from their choice of technological-implementation, _or_ you allow things to grow unbounded such that they become de facto utilities.
"Correct" goes at the front; see panel 4. You remember the order along with the words, and the imagery is a cue to aid memory, not a script.
Dehosting is a problem of capitalism which is why the erosion of the progressive era regulations and the attempts to prevent their reinforcement and update are things that need to be settled now. Today, we live in the second Gilded Age where maybe a dozen people can affect policies that impact millions of people. You want freedom then you have to put limits on what the rich can do or make it unlawful to be that rich (divestment and breakup).
Our entire legal system rests on the (rather obvious) principle of hearing both sides in order to find the truth, but the brain rot has somehow progressed to the point where in the media this is considered some sort of fallacy (“both-sidesism”). Lots of people want to appoint some sort of information gatekeeper, with no anticipation that one day the gatekeepers might turn against you.
I think, it's called "elaboration" (In Standard ML) .. into elaborative semantics (AST that makes sense for evaluation phrase).
And even if you DO eat them correctly, you're likely to subject everyone around you to random chemical attacks.

The analogy works!
I believe this is not a hostile takeover. It's an unsolicited bid to purchase the company directly to the board. A hostile takeover would involve a tender or purchases directly to shareholders to purchase stocks ignoring the board or likely against the wishes of the board.
In the magic and stage mentalism worlds, this one is a bit of a classic:
Trance-Formations: Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the Structure of Hypnosis - 1981. When I was doing magic, I found quite a bit of it to be useful in helping structure routines, patter, or improve non-mentalist effects.

https://www.amazon.com/Trance-Formations-Neuro-Linguistic-Pr...
> Why not provide each individual users with powerful tools that let them specify the type of content they want to see and when.

Agreed, but that's the issue - many people don't want anyone to see some content because they are convinced such misinformation causes people they don't like to be elected, etc. I'm of the opinion that filtering is its own type of propaganda.
A Physical Description of Flight; Revisited (2009)
ur dugs a nazi
So would you be happy to see ISIS recruiting videos in your feeds? What about your children's? I would consider the calls for free speech much more believable if they had been made when ISIS accounts were blocked. However, people only started calling out when it affected white supremacists or conspiracy theories popular with a portion of the white conservative constituency.

This tells me that most people are quite happy with limits on free speech, just not "their side".
https://www.chalkbeat.org/22525983/map-critical-race-theory-...
At the very least it does reveal why the narratives constructed by some journalists are so utterly divorced from reality.
[1] It's not easy to determine how many root-level comments should be shown in the first page. You need to count sub-comments as well, and second level comments should have loaded as "expanded", it's also not easy to decide how many second level comments should be shown as expanded. The amount of them could be 10 and 100 or 1000.

So if you just say like "10" comments, the letters in just one comment could be worth of 100 comments. So you also need a "show more" button for each comment exceeds some character limit.

If you do a viewport optimization, you need to calculate the rendered size of a comment section and request only comments visible for the browser viewport.

That's why it's difficult.

* Elon Mush threads shows only one thread now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025061

Edit: Looks like it is no longer an issue. It shows latest comments.
For Twitter, perhaps a good compromise would be: instead of banning problematic accounts, set to them a "default-mute" state where only people who choose to follow the account can see its tweets.

See also Section 1.F of https://www.journaloffreespeechlaw.org/volokh.pdf , which distinguishes how Twitter's 'hosting' function might be treated differently from its curation functions.
They absolutely do. The vast majority of the events I interact with these people at are open to the public with announcements in local news papers. They have dedicated communication channels. The last person I helped spent every Saturday for two months hanging out at the town dump to meet people and hear their concerns. He is planning on making it a monthly event going forward. It can be amazing how empty town, village, and county board meetings are. Show up, state your opinion in a respectful manner, come prepared with an informed argument, and take the time to chat with people afterwards. They'll remember you and if you have a consistent track record of being level-headed and productive, you can start to carry some real influence.

Like much in life, half the battle is just showing up.
But can you either be tolerant of those who are not tolerant of the intolerant. I would group them similarly as bad or even worse.
Yep, I had an Ultra 20 opteron. Nice machine.
If the moderation here starts banning / shadow-banning / hiding prominent voices that run counter to HN's politics, they will.
I am sorry this thread got hijacked. I had the same thought as the OP: vaccines work by training the bodies own defences. The description of this spray sounds more like a disinfectant that prevents the virus from binding to human cells. Can anyone knowledgeable on HN clarify this?
Scary if he wins. One super powerful shit disturber with a personal agenda controlling one of the largest social news sources out there.

It goes from a company fighting to survive, who probably has little agenda (or time and power to really fight for it), to a company that exists simply to serve the whims of one man's agenda and every change and action will be for that purpose, albeit not advertised as such. How else better to amplify one's voice and discredit anyone else's? Sow chaos, fuel rumours, surface chatter that will affect markets to his favour and to dick around with politicians and countries that aren't doing him any favours. It definitely doesn't sit right.

The real question is why, because I very much doubt he wants to "improve" twitter, it's more like what does he want to accomplish by owning the platform to advance his other goals.
I’m surprised this hasn’t already happened. If everyone’s browsing history was published in the way everyone’s opinion is published on twitter then I bet ISPs would be blocking sites left and right
No, the journalist will just report from an "anonymous source" instead.
And there's already clear evidence of collusion to censor certain entities between those companies. It's hardly a "what if?" scenario.
Currently, most strange state keys seem to have been removed. When you check the web archive (http://web.archive.org/web/20211201000716/https://iview.abc....) though, you can see variables like "USER": "www-data", "HOME": "/var/www" and "PATH": "/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/snap/bin". There's something called "DRM_WEB_SECRET" which isn't currently in the HTML anymore, I'm guessing they shouldn't have shared that.
Twitter sells you a voice to a possibly broad audience depending on how many followers you have, the ads are a micro-currency to facilitate these transactions between voice haver and voice hearer.
But there is a reason why people choose Twitter.com over OtherWaysToSpeak.com.
> "I think this is for the best, however it always leads to problems"

Well to be fair, I did say I was torn on this and have no answers :)

The concept of "the solution to bad speech, being more speech" is somewhat of a safe default to me. All things being equal, I think it's more important to err on the side of protecting the voices of those who should and need to be heard, while accepting the risk that these very protections may also inadvertently benefit "extremists" in that they too are more likely to be heard.

I prefer this balance, as opposed to the opposite, of strict moderation. Silencing the voices of those with something important to say, in order to ensure that we don't let any extremists get their views out.

So that's my default starting position.

But I'm not absolutist about it. I think we can't be too binary about it, at either end of the spectrum. The answer is not one of two choices, "100% no free speech" or "100% free speech". Instead, it's presumably somewhere in the middle.

So the answer is probably, "light touch, just enough moderation, based on some form of consensus".

How you define "just enough" is a tough problem.

Perhaps it's the consensus part that's missing at the moment.
I know a site, it's on mobile. You use it by entering a location in a search bar.

You select the search bar, the keyboard takes a second to appear. You start typing, nothing happens because they've reimplemented the text box in javascript, and the script hasn't fully loaded yet. The script loads and the second half of the letters you typed appears in a letter by letter fashion. The page freezes and a suggestion box appears, every second or so the suggestions change to reflect the letters you typed earlier. You erase what you've typed. With every letter that changes, the page freezes a second as a new suggestion loads. When it freezes, it stops accepting letters, so there's a lot of erasing and re-typing. Alright, you're almost done typing... then the page freezes and the page turns grey, and a pop over loads. They want you to load fill out a satisfaction survey. You try to close it to continue, but the script handling the close button hasn't loaded yet so it doesn't work for a good 20 seconds.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a javascript stomping on a human face -- for ever.
Show HN: Tamper-Proof Ledger Web App (OSS)
Another billionaire that buys a media outlet to massage the public's opinion to their need.
I can definitely understand giving the benefit of the doubt in most situations, its usually the best move to foster trust and empathy between parties.

When I consider the statement by the OP, I don't know what the reason for including race/nationality could possibly be that isn't malicious. It adds literally no extra context besides the insinuation that 'these people aren't the same as me' ('me' being the OP)

Maybe someone else has a different perspective and they can explain how they see the statement and how it might not be a purely ingroup/outgroup exclusion/racism thing
Labeling it "opinion" does not protect you from being sued for libel, or for copyright infringement, or...

Someone is spouting nonsense here, but it isn't me.
I see this positively. Musk cannot save what the Internet is becoming, but he may be able to prevent Twitter from being completely captured by leftists fascists.
Very inspiring and insightful story! Thanks for sharing it.
If you can't be bothered to contact your representative, how does your representative know your opinion?

You don't need social media to inform your representative of your opinions--and quite frankly, more direct communication is probably more effective in informing your representative of your opinions than social media.
Sending dishes to Ukraine?
Someone living in US cannot be jailed for advocating genocide, but can be fired from work for disagreeing with latest woke positions.

Here i can be jailed for advocating genocide, but cannot be fired from work for disagreeing with latest woke positions.

Who has better freedom of speech?
Any hostile takeover becomes non-hostile if the board/shareholders acquiesce.
Oh, yeah, that can be fun, in theory I can have at the same time :

- 4 different fiber ISPs (in practice only 2-3, because 2-3 of them are sharing the same fiber line)

- 1 ADSL on the copper line

- up to 4 5G connections

- who knows how many satellite connections

That would be total overkill for 99+% of the people of course, but it's really nice to have 0 downtime when switching ISPs because the previous one still works when you start using the new one !
In practice it will be a arbitrary weapon used by politicians in the Chinese regime to club companies that don't play ball over the head with.

It's all value-based judgements. Entirely subjective laws. What is "disinformation", "manipulate user accounts", or "convenient option"?

The answer to all those things "Whatever the hell the regime feels like".

Meaning that if you want to avoid being accused of not providing a "convenient-enough option to turn off the algorithmic recommendation service" then you have to keep the Chinese politicians happy with you and your company. Essentially whether or not you are breaking the law depends on their perception/how pleased they are of what you are doing.

Keep in mind that we are dealing with a totalitarian regime. Their idea of things like "false news" is going to be any history that does not align with their communist agenda. Such as covid probably originated from a research facility in Wuhan, that Mao's rise to power involved slaughtering peasants, or that something untoward happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

This isn't to "protect users" it's to provide yet another legislative club they can use to force western corporations to give the government ever increasing concessions.
Some elements of the law are part of the GDPR, but I would say that the Chinese law has an much more broad and ambitious scope. GDPR regulates that a human is not subject to an automatic decision that has a (negative) legal effect on him or her. The Chinese law additionally prohibits elements that built addiction, prevent bots from registering accounts, not generate synthetic false information, etc.

I would assume that enforcing such a law is extremely hard. The cynical part of me assumes that the unclear regulations will be used to silence companies and individuals that do not match the governments ideology. But I still think that many countries would be well adviced to include something similar in their legislation.
For $1B he could make an exact twitter clone, and he could probably do it for much less than that. You might say, yes, but he's paying for the brand, and no one would use his clone. He could pay for a flood of advertising and other promotions to get people to switch. He could pay 42,000,000 people $1000 each to switch to his twitter clone.
Which doesn’t sound very dangerous to me
In a way we're fortunate that the descent down the slippery slope happened far faster than we could have imagined. We went from "we'll only use these powers to censor the flat earthers" to country's major social media companies blacking out a damaging story about the former Vice President's son moments before the highest turnout election in American history: https://www.npr.org/2022/04/09/1091859822/more-details-emerg....

The basic problem with the notion of "censoring misinformation" and even "fact checking" is that the "flat earth" stuff isn't really what anyone cares about. It's the debatable stuff that people have the desire and incentive to censor. That's always the way it works out.
Or they realized that their initial expectations were inaccurate. The market in general sure did, so why not the IPO investors? It boils down to how they perceive the opportunity cost of the decision, not how they valued the company a decade ago.
That article is a discombobulated conservative rant that accuses all corporate America of being leftist (please), and contains zero verifiable details that support the title, as far as I can tell.

What, exactly, is it saying the ACLU did? What, exactly, is it referring to? The only sentence that even attempts to answer that question is: “an ACLU official said it was perfectly legitimate for his lawyers to decline to defend hate speech.”

That statement is a fact. Hate speech is explicitly exempt from U.S. Free Speech protections. If you’re going to defend Free Speech, please read a little about the limitations on Free Speech, and some of the history that brought about those limitations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech#Limitations

Limits on Free Speech is as much a conservative value as a liberal value. Framing this as a leftist takeover of “woke” values is a thinly veiled misinformation FUD campaign designed to confuse you about what U.S. values are and convince you liberals are attacking, while hypocritically doing all the attacking. Don’t let this junk work on you, stay curious and seek verifiable facts, not tribal opinion.
SM is not a utility but the ability to disseminate information to huge number of peoples is and it's just as important to regulate as electricity and sewage. Moderation of information is the fourth arm of the government and needs to be developed if we're ever going to be able to trust each other again.

It has never been an issue before because the means of communication have always been limited but modern electronic communication has changed all that and it's clear that we can't exist in this wild west phase anymore.

SM had eroded the trust in institutions and between people and groups. It had put all of us in bubbles just to sell ads. Informational and cognitive hygiene must be recognized and taught to everyone so people can defend themselves and take care of what they hold dear and true.
Yes - a lot of people claim that shadow banning, downranking etc. are censorship. I disagree, they necessary to keep online places as civil as they are.

There's also content that is regarded by mental health experts as harmful in large quantities - downranking that is also important to not cause existential harm to people.
Do you have evidence that it wasn't? Why do you get to decide the null hypothesis?
By "then" it might be too late - lots of discussions leverage "too late to change now". This is how climate change is in such a horrible state.

Also, who says when we "are there"? Maybe we are already?
"Platforming" is just weasel wording by people who want to justify censorship. Just like "misinformation" has become a blanket justification to censor.

Once you have human arbiters determining what is and what is not "good" information, and censoring based on it, you are acting in bad faith against free speech.
Why is this discussion only about the free speech on the internet? This is a business news story about an SEC filing. There is certainly other possible interesting discussions in regards to the financial aspects of this story.

If it cannot happen here in this discussion, HN should not be so quick to flag/dupe/dead the other submissions which are from other business or news publications.
A lot of them are remotely exploitable but most are information disclosures or DoS vectors, which don't always need to be "high". Remote code execution, definitely "high".
In sincerely doubt that goal of this legislation is to "curb information gathering".

This is kinda the entire point of their social credit system.
Einstein, Newton weren't peer reviewed. Has the method of science regressed?
I don't agree with Twitter's moderation, but how exactly are we losing the freedom of speech?

Whiners are free to demand companies to boycott Twitter ads when they see a tweet they don't like. The companies are free to stop buying ads from Twitter. Twitter is free to appease these whiners by moderating speech the way they want it, so they don't lose out on revenue. Elon Musk is free to disagree with that business strategy and buy 10% of Twitter.
Twitter would have killed for this type of buyout offer 6 years ago.
> My experience of twitter is almost entirely defined by the people I follow

This is probably, broadly speaking, false.

Maybe it was once true, and maybe it should be true, but I guess it’s more likely that most people (including you) see and interact with all the people you follow, interacting with all the people they follow (retweets, etc.) interacting with all the people they follow.

3 degrees of separation.

If you never saw any tweets other than the immediate people you follow tweeting to each other, then perhaps… but, that’s not how twitter works.

…and then on top of that, how did you end up following those people? Personal friends? Or perhaps, via twitters moderated hash tags?

That’s different moderation, not no moderation.

What you’re describing is something closer to signal/WhatsApp groups; different, much less moderated personal groups. Sure. Good for what it is…

There’s an app for that; it’s just not twitter.
I suspect that this distinction will be irrelevant to the next generation, as services like GitHub Code Spaces, which provide a full development environment inside a web browser, become more normal.
I don't understand. We're still talking about trivial numbers. This is a tree with ~800 nodes or comments. There is no "dynamic viewport" optimization, HN is static HTML (and we love it for it!).
It's far easier for the lazy to dismiss based on tone rather than content. Crazy people are distressed (at least when we notice them), so distressed people are crazy. But hidden in PC language about concern, illness, and help, while pretending to be a psychologist.
> TikTok successfully serves you new content - doesn't think that just because you liked a cat you want cats and cats only.

I agree with most of your comment - but tiktok might be a terrible example:

"One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine (nrk.no)"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30917474
Your comment seems to cover a lot of territory, but it's not very specific.

If you'd like to go deeper on a single line of criticism of the GP, I'd be interested in reading it.
Finding and Analyzing Crash-Consistency Bugs in Persistent-Memory File Systems